Dan Luzadder | The Manchurian Journalist: Lawrence Wright, the CIA, and the Corruption of American Journalism

I don't plan it, but bin masters almost surely have a plan There's clearly maybe something there beyond the realm of man And until we've thoroughly tested every last close-chested view I find the more we think we know, the less we really do Where would we be without THC? Because we know they're lying to us, just don't know to what degree Where would we be without THC? The highest voting company Here we go, Higher Side Chatters, doing what we do from the Sunshine State. I'm Greg Carlwood, and it should be no surprise as to why the state of our society is unraveled into a variety of individualized reality tunnels where the credibility of any established journalism is severely eroded. We've seen too many examples of mainstream media figures fawning over narrative-regurgitating journalists with producers carefully selecting from their pre-approved roster of award-winning, well-connected, Ivy League-educated, intelligence-trained establishment tools to tell whatever story the system wants told. It seems that anyone paraded out on prime time has already checked the ideological boxes required to be given the airtime. And one has to wonder just how far compromised the system is when almost any household name in the entire media landscape can be called on to uphold the same system-wide script on any newly emerging issue. It seems so ironclad and absolute that it gives the game away to anyone with a critical eye, leaving many of us to cobble together our own sense of truth from the outside with our own personal pantheons of independent journalists we've decided to trust. Well, today's guest, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dan Luzader, could certainly be such a journalist as he's deconstructed our sad situation in his new book, The Manchurian Journalist, Lawrence Wright, The CIA and the Corruption of American Journalism, where he uses Lawrence Wright, a longtime fixture of American journalism, as an example of a well-established template where certain intelligence-connected people are selected to be the beacons of truth in our media, writing the New York Times bestsellers that seed official narratives on a whole host of highly charged stories. Dan himself has been a journalist for over 40 years and has been honored nationally by the American Bar Association for exposing corruption in the federal courts, and he's won numerous state and regional awards for writing and reporting. In addition to a 1983 Pulitzer for general local reporting, he's been twice nominated for investigative work, including his inquiries into the police handling of the Columbine High School massacre. He was also named a member of the Scripps Howard Journalism Hall of Fame in 1993. His new book, from our friends at Trine Day, is a great deep dive into a subject well worth exploring, so let's do it. The intelligence web detangler, propaganda press prodder, and mockingbird media meddler, Dan, welcome to the higher side. Hey, Greg. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks for doing this. I really enjoyed your book. We know media today is highly compromised. We've seen the montages of dozens of news stations reading the same corporate script. We know high-profile people like Anderson Cooper come from prominent families with intelligence training often glossed over in their resume. We've heard at least the cliff notes of Operation Mockingbird. And like I kind of said in that intro, it seems like this program has been almost too successful. They've given the game away because it's not just a few select people peppered in to steer things to their liking. Now it basically seems like the whole media apparatus. But let's start with how it turned into this. What do you consider some of the important things for people to understand about this process of compromising journalism to the degree that it has been today? Well, let me go back to when I started taking a look at these issues involving the CIA and the post-World War II intelligence community. At the time, as we were exiting the Second World War and there was a realization that intelligence was going to be a prominent part of the coming years, the CIA and its fellow travelers were concerned about what Americans were hearing about capitalism, about communism, about the state of our own culture. And I think their anxiety in the wake of World War II was what stimulated the development of programs to bring people closer to the elite intelligence community that existed within the country at the time. And that community was not just the Central Intelligence Agency. It was a broader network that involved people involved in banking, at law, in other parts of the American culture who were interested in preserving the idea of Western cultural values and promoting democracy. But the problems that I saw when I began to look into this was that there was a lot of secrecy about what was going on behind the scenes involving media. And of course, we didn't know, generally speaking, that individuals within the American media were treated differently by those who sought to secure their cooperation. And so even though I had been in the business of journalism my entire life since I was a teenager, I wasn't really aware of the depth to which efforts had been developed to recruit people who had ideas that were useful to promoting a certain attitude within the country and to stifling other ideas about our culture that might be talked about if the publishing world were a little more independent from the intelligence community. So it was something of a journey for me into this area of journalism that I hadn't particularly taken a look at before that kind of opened my eyes to the idea that there are influences that have existed, have long existed, that affected not only newspapers and radio and TV, but also affected the entertainment media, certainly, movies and book publishing. And this was an eye-opener for me into how people go about shaping ideas that we accept as true and don't question. Certain ideas, cultural ideas, certain attitudes, and certain beliefs about the rest of the world that we end up adopting, and yet we don't know where the roots of these ideas come from. Mm-hmm. That is a great summary. And I'm curious about what you said about seeing this in the entertainment industry. Obviously, that's not a huge part of your book, but I see that too. And I've had some guests talk about the history of Hollywood and how they used to show war footage, carefully selected war footage before films. When you got everyone there to see something totally unrelated, you hit them with the propaganda before the movie starts. And then movies themselves. I mean, it's always rah-rah America for the most part. Even if they try to market it as critical, it ends up coming back around to serving the narrative, typically. And even just types of people and our perception of even Native Americans. It's colored by the film industry and the Wild West and all that stuff. And so many action films will have a villain that is Russian, some kind of Russian spy, that whole thing. We went through that chapter. But talk to us a little bit more for people who might not make that connection because it's kind of easy to see in journalism why intelligence agency would be interested in compromising reporting on real world events. But even in entertainment, we see it. Where do you see it there? Well, I think you make a good point about American perceptions of the Wild West and the days of Native Americans. Certainly, that presentation in the entertainment industry was skewed dramatically toward what was acceptable to white Americans and blatantly distorts history where the conditions of expansion of the American frontier were concerned. But the idea that movies and presentation of ideas through the movies would be part of a propaganda program to encourage certain attitudes struck me most particularly when I started to take a look at the censorship board that was developed during the start of World War II, or actually just at the beginning of World War II. And a man named Lowell Mellett, who came from Indiana, which is where I'm from, and Nelson Poynter, who was the founder of the Poynter Institute, very influential in American journalism. Those two men were responsible for selecting what was acceptable in American films and worked through the federal government to help convince Hollywood movie producers and directors to present American attitudes and American ideas in particular ways. And so that was something that was not too hard to find in history. But as I was looking into the arena of publishing and discovered that there was a network that was composed to recruit people into the publishing industry and into journalism and into the entertainment media in all forms, it became more apparent to me that this was not something to which there was mild interest paid. There was significant interest paid. And the individuals who were participating in this were very influential and very powerful throughout not only American government, but American culture and society. So these all form legs of the stool in which we as Americans, I think, did not see a really accurate picture of who we were and what we were and the controversies that went on within society about what we should or should not do or what we should or should not believe. I think while there were, as you mentioned, Operation Mockingbird, there were dedicated programs out of the Central Intelligence Agency itself, there was a network of intelligence cooperatives that worked outside the agency but in close coordination with the Central Intelligence Agency to help represent these ideas and make them part of our culture. Again, great summary. And you really nailed it with selecting what's acceptable because so often with these conversations, the emphasis is on the creator themselves, the journalist themselves, the actor, the screenwriter, and the question of how conscious a participant are they in all this. And really, it can be quite unconscious because if you have the producers and the agents and the publishers and the people who decide what's elevated and what doesn't get picked up, that is something that kind of creates a perception. And you might have a person who never went to the Ivy Leagues or never was trained in intelligence, but they've written two books and they didn't get picked up. And then they look at what does get picked up and they're like, oh, well, maybe I should write a 9-11 book that just is boilerplate official narrative and then maybe that'll get me into the New York Times bestsellers list. And obviously, that would be a conscious action, but it just shows how when you control the mechanisms of making a career in journalism or entertainment, you can, just using the economic levers, control people and what they're going to produce because you just see what makes it and what doesn't if you're perceptive enough. And that creates a whole confusion around who really was brought up in all this and who just saw what works and took it. But yeah, that's the kind of control mechanism. I think that's what should be highlighted is those producers, those publishers, those agents, because that's the means of production, as they say. You know, I think it's easy to look at this intelligence environment that exists within our country and consider it sort of an amorphous, unidentified situation that we can't really pull apart. We can't pull the threads apart. But as I was doing this book and came across this summer class, a summer course that was produced at Radcliffe College, the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures course, I began to see the first physical evidence, really trackable evidence, of how a recruiting program could be put together to attract people specifically into the publishing industry itself. And so while we might think, well, their ideas are skewed one way or another, or we show particular favoritism in dealing with authors or writers who present acceptable ideas. It was deeper than that. When you set about to recruit people into the publishing industry, and I'm talking about major publishing houses, the Random Houses and the Harper and Brothers kinds of organizations in New York that really were so influential in picking writers that were going to be promoted, their ideas were going to be pushed forward. In seeing an organization that worked to select people who were favorable to those kinds of things, it takes on a deeper meaning. And in the book, I identify those individuals who were working through this intelligence network to promote these ideas. So it wasn't just casting your bread upon the waters and hoping that people picked up on the idea. It was more selecting the oarsmen who were going to row the boat across the stream and which direction it was going to go. So as I was investigating this and digging ever deeper into it, I began to see that the cultural impact of deciding which writer might be promoted, which writer might not be promoted had a lot of value to those who were very interested in shaping ideas in America about what we should do, what we shouldn't do, and what our attitudes internationally should be toward others. Mm-hmm. Yes, and I have a lengthy quote about the Radcliffe program I took from your book that is really interesting. And Lawrence Wright, this is where he got his journalistic credentials. And Lawrence Wright might be one of these people who is more selected as an oarsman. And for people who aren't familiar with his work, he wrote The Looming Tower, Al-Qaeda, and The Road to 9-11, The Terror Years from Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State. So very big in crafting the perceptions around the war on terror. And then more recently, he also wrote The Plague Year, America in the Time of COVID. I can only guess what kind of perspective he'll offer in that book. But to talk about the Radcliffe program a little bit, this is the quote. You say, wherever Wright heard about the six-week summer course at Radcliffe, he must have been planning participation for some time. The course, I would learn, recruited most of its students itself, even using publishing houses and their agents to visit prospective journalism and English programs to search for promising candidates. Helen Venn, an assistant director of the RPPC upon its inception and director from the early 1950s until 1980, would herself travel to interview students, records showed. Wright made his enrollment sound like a whim. But in fact, the program turned away two-thirds of its applicants and they made applications a full year in advance. It was a tough program to get into, but Wright had no problem enrolling. I would quickly discover the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures course wasn't really for writers or even those who wanted to be writers. Nothing in the curriculum sustained that ambition or notion other than exposing students each year to famous American authors. The course had been designed for those who had published writers, for those who would pick a writer's work as viable, recommended and promote it as appropriate and enable the mechanisms of publishing to make those works available to the reading public at large by distribution and promotion. This mini-master's degree in the world of American publishing claimed something that would be the envy of any academic venture, a better than 95% placement rate for its graduates, many, if not most, among the elite empires of book and magazine publishing, literary agencies, and academic presses across the country. Well, that says a lot. I'm sure this program is just one of many, but it is a peek into how the machine works. And Lawrence Wright, curiously, the reason this is kind of relevant is because he wrote an autobiography on himself before he really was popular. He kind of backlogged all of his background so that the background that people knew in this memoir would cut around all the intelligence aspects aspects and anything that might lead a person to think he was less than organic and genuine. Is that right? I think that's a pretty good summary. One of the things that was so interesting as I began to look into Lawrence Wright's background was I discovered that his father had become president of a small storefront bank in Dallas, Texas, and Wright in his memoir that he wrote when he was in his 30s, late 30s, talks about his father's history as a military man and his patriotism and his interest in encouraging development in East Dallas and his participation in various programs in the city government there to, for the betterment of the community. But one of the things he failed to mention was the fact that this little storefront bank had been founded and was owned by a very prominent individual in American culture. Not someone whose name jumps readily to mind when you think about the history of American democratic development around the time of World War II, but someone who was extremely influential and that was Robert Story. He was head of the American Bar Association during his tenure. He was head of the Southern Methodist University Law School. He was the dean there. He was head of the International Bar Association and he was chief executive trial prosecutor in the Nuremberg War Trials. In addition to that, he was working with the State Department to develop scholarship programs for foreign students that were brought to America and interestingly enough, the Fulbright scholarships and other programs that were bringing people in were targeted toward individuals whose families were influential in foreign countries or who had access to people in power. And so this recruiting network that Robert Story was involved in was a little slice also that exposed some attitudes about how intelligence networks were developed. but Lawrence Wright never mentioned the fact in any of his writings, in his memoirs, magazine stories, his books, never mentioned this close relationship between his father and this very prominent individual, very influential individual in our intelligence community. And I thought that was odd and that was part of what led me to track down the working mechanisms of this recruiting program, which it turned out included a foundation out of Dallas, Texas, the Hoblitzel Foundation, which was put together by Carl Hoblitzel, who was very close to Robert's story and they worked very cooperatively. And Hoblitzel Foundation produced some $500 million in funding back in the 40s and 50s to sustain these recruiting programs, to encourage development of book publishing operations, to develop book publishing operations overseas, one of which was the Franklin Books Program, which was a direct effort to develop Western cultural ideas around the world. And Helen Venn of the Little Radcliffe Publishing Procedures course was very influential in that program and she traveled the world recruiting publishers in foreign countries into these operations, encouraging them with funds, with opportunities, with travel to the U.S., with whatever they might be interested in to continue to develop intelligence friendships. But we never saw any of that, never heard of any of that, and certainly Lawrence Wright never mentioned any of his close association to these programs, going back to his own family in all of his work. So, one of the things that was kind of fun and was kind of interesting as I was looking into this was I went to the Harvard Library and dug up the Radcliffe Publishing Course archives and there I found a photograph of Helen Venn with editors from Rolling Stone Magazine and the founder and editor of Texas Monthly, which is a very popular high culture magazine produced out of Austin and in one of those photographs the producer of Texas Monthly, the founder of Texas Monthly is kneeling and kissing Helen Venn's ring more or less as you can see in the book. But the idea that these background systems existed and these cooperatives existed and people were in publishing even what we consider practically alternative publishing like Rolling Stone, that these were people who were involved in these programs of recruitment and encouraging ideas and developing writers who had acceptable ideas and those sorts of things that encouraged the ideas that this intelligence network wanted and promoted. that was a fascinating sort of journey into the detail and the fabric of these kinds of programs. Yeah, it's always so wild when I learn about a new person and just the bullet points on their resume. Robert Story, head of the American Bar Association, dean of a law school, executive trial prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, involved in this Franklin book program, crafting stories for education and then involved with Helen Venn who was head of this Radcliffe program and then it just seems like you select your buddy's son. Hey, you know, Lawrence wants to be a journalist. Let's put him in the school. Let's give him the credentials here and then we've got all the access. He'll be on all the networks. His books will become popular and that's just the way it goes and I can't believe we're almost a quarter into this thing and we haven't mentioned Going Clear, Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief which is probably Lawrence Wright's most popular work and this is the odd one to me because I understand why the system at large would want a book about Al-Qaeda and the road to 9-11 or why they'd want the plague year, America in the time of COVID. I'm not as clear on why they would want a book about Scientology or why Scientology would be attacked in this way and I'm always really hard on religions and cults and this sort of thing so I'm primed to eat all this up and to just be like yeah, Scientology is a cult where they use this confession booth 2.0 intelligence gathering to compromise people and then get their secrets and then charge them monthly for dues until the end of their days and these people are kind of afraid to speak out because they already gave all their dirty little secrets to the organization and that's how it's presented and that's kind of what I've accepted. I mean, I listen to interviews with Leah Remini or even Ron Miscavige, the guy's dad, will do interviews. He's been on Rogan, as I'm sure you know, and it just seems like I don't know what the spin is on Scientology, I guess, because it all seems like it fits pretty well, but here's a guy whose whole career is crafting spin. What do you think was the motivation for going after Scientology in this way and what do you think are the major things that are wrong about the public perception? You know, one of the questions and the way I got into this project was through the Church of Scientology. I was freelancing, I was doing some work for the New York Times, New York Daily News and others and when you're a freelancer you're constantly looking for opportunities and I was contacted by the Church when they were relaunching a magazine that they had produced for many years and which, interestingly enough, had done some really quality investigative work back in the 70s and 80s in opening up government records to the public and the Church's magazine was very influential in developing the Freedom of Information Act as it turned out, I would discover as I was looking into this, but I was contacted by the Church and they were looking for an investigative reporter to do some work for this magazine, Freedom Magazine, as they were relaunching it. But what they mainly wanted me to look at was the coverage of the Church and asked me to evaluate how fair and equitable it was and whether or not the press was antagonistic toward the Church unnecessarily. So when I undertook that, I said, you know, I'm happy to take a look at all that, but here's the caveat. I'm going to ask questions and you have to answer them. If you want to participate in this program, you're going to have to document what you say. And so that was one of the interesting things is that as I worked with Church officials and worked with and around the magazine and asked for records, they were very good about bringing them forward. Of course, you know, the Church was interested in promoting their own particular point of view and their own ideas about that coverage. But as I began to look into Lawrence Wright's history then and try to pursue the idea of why did he write this book about Scientology when there were so many subjects out there that journalists could write about, part of the interesting aspect was that I couldn't define any clear line to the reasons that Lawrence Wright decided to do this book, even though what I did discover was that the Church of Scientology had been of interest to the American intelligence community for a long, long time. And I think part of the reason for that was that the Church took a stance about war, peace, the development of war machines in the American culture, anti-war, and those ideas were antithema to some of the ideas that were being promoted by the intelligence community that supported the necessity of developing strong defense, of preparing the country for war constantly, for preparing for the perpetuation of our military industrial complex. And so there was definitely some antagonism toward the Church in the early days, a lot of suspicions, and a lot of effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to develop information about them. But I couldn't necessarily draw a bright line to why Lawrence Wright wrote this particular book. what it did do was it opened up some ideas to why journalists might adhere to a particular point of view or a particular attitude. So I would say that Lawrence Wright's work in multiple arenas from the war on terror to other aspects of American culture did follow a pattern that was one of acceptability and one of exclusion. And those are two aspects that I found important to understanding what had happened in the past. So as I worked more closely on this idea of Lawrence Wright's accuracy in his coverage of the Church, that's when I began to explore his background and what he had written about himself. So one of the interesting things that I noticed early on was that not only was Lawrence Wright writing books, but he was writing screenplays. And often his work was mentioned by journalists who were writing about him and about his explorations, that he was prescient in things that were happening within the culture. He was writing about them on the cusp of things that were happening. And one illustration that I saw that was very important was the screenplay he did for a movie called The Siege. It was a movie with Denzel Washington and Annette Bening, and it described a terror attack in the city of New York and reactions, political reactions to that terror attack that imposed restrictions on citizenry. But this book talked about terrorists in the Middle East, identified individuals who were eerily like those who were described then subsequently in 9-11 and the attack on New York. And so Lawrence Wright himself even talked about this publicly when he produced his book and a film he did with Alex Gibney, My Trip to Al-Qaeda. He describes his own prescient perspective through his film, but this was illustrative of what had gone on in Hollywood and in the entertainment industry where certain ideas were influenced by the CIA or the intelligence community that's broader than the CIA, but we don't see that. We don't hear about it. We don't know what those influences were. So it was in looking at the church and in looking at that coverage, while I never was able to answer definitively why he decided to do that book or the film that followed with Alex Gibney, the documentary film. It was illustrative of the things behind the scenes that I came to understand were important in the background of the development of attitudes or promotion of attitudes and people with appropriate attitudes that fit with the cultural ideas of this community. And so in that way, while I didn't come to a conclusion about rights purpose or intent or some particular intelligence-driven idea toward negative coverage of the church, certainly it was part of the same mix. It was all part of the same recipe. Yeah, and this isn't about Scientology, but it's just interesting that we have this public perception and then you learn about the person who largely crafted it and it seems like all the work they've done is really calculated and all about setting up a narrative and maybe Scientology was just an unfortunate target to establish some credibility because if it's all highly charged military operations work, then you're like, well, this is clearly an operation, but this is the one that stands out, this work on Scientology and maybe is handlers or whatever were just like, hey, these guys have been kind of a thorn in our side, they criticized the military-industrial complex, let's take them down. And I don't know where the truth and the fiction really is, but it's just interesting to know about a motivation because when you look at Scientology, you would think, oh, well, these people are basically prisoners of this religion. And so the person who exposed this clearly is just doing it out of the goodness of their heart to expose this great misdeed like it's the NXIVM cult or something, but it just doesn't seem to be that way. So I don't know the truth about Scientology. I don't have a dog in the Scientology fight, but that was the first thing where I was like, wait a minute, I thought I knew about Scientology. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on the bullet points here of this organization. And now that's all called into question. I don't know to what degree, but it is just interesting to have to rework some of that. And sometimes, you know, it doesn't mean that it's all fake. It's just like, well, there was a motivation to highlight this organization over others. I also see a lot of that happening to Mormonism, which is another religion that people say is really great at intelligence gathering and record keeping. And maybe it's just the CIA looking at this as competition. Like, hey, these people, they got an intelligence apparatus here that we need to infiltrate and we need to at least take them down from a PR perspective. You know, one thing that was fascinating to me was that this journey into the Church of Scientology and taking a look at their history and their own desires and their own programs. Scientology became an illustration for coverage of certain areas of our culture by the American media. And so, I think the happy or unhappy accident, however you might describe it, of me having to come in contact with the Church and their magazine reflects something that I think is part of my own history, is that as a journalist, I was given an opportunity to explore worlds that most people don't come in contact with. And so, one of the approaches that I made as a young journalist was to look into stories that people dismissed or people weren't interested in necessarily as being part of their particular worldview. So, one of the things I did was I investigated prisons and human rights conditions and prisons. And I had a city editor at one point tell me, why are you spending your time on this? These people are in prison because they committed crimes, they're where they belong and who cares what happens inside? Well, my attitude was we need to know what's happening inside our prisons and how people are being treated because these are human beings, for one thing, and for another, they're reflective of the kind of culture we develop it in government to treat people fairly or not treat people fairly. So, I looked into the worlds of crime, I went underground many times to develop relationships with people, even into organized crime in Chicago and those sorts of things. So, when this opportunity came along to take a look at the Church of Scientology, I think a lot of reporters would have said, no, that's not, you know, we know what this is all about, I don't want to be involved in this. But I think it's important for journalists to step back from their own attitudes, of course, and to take a fair look at things more objectively than we tend to do. So, what I saw with the Church of Scientology was that reporters, journalists covering aspects of the Church or writing about it tended to pile on with what was the acceptable idea. Just as you couldn't get reporters interested in covering issues in state prisons or federal prisons because it's difficult and it's very messy to do that kind of reporting. So, also, it was much easier for reporters to assume that what was reported before about the Church was gospel, if you will. And so, rather than doing that, I did what I think all journalists should do, which is to suspend those beliefs of what's reported before, no matter who's reporting it, and find out for yourself what's actually going on. And so, that was the journey that I was involved in, was actually finding out. And I did that by interviewing Scientologists really all over the world, and by getting on the inside of the organization, where I had the opportunity to talk with the leadership of the Church, to ask questions. And sometimes there were antagonistic moments in that process, because there were certain things that I disagreed with or talked about or raised issues, and we fought about them. But we always fought about them in an equitable way. And so, in the end, I was impressed with the leadership of the Church in their ability to actually step back from themselves and try to look at their coverage of the Church. I did find some faults in how they responded often to the media coverage and often encouraged them to be more transparent. In fact, that was one of the hallmarks of my association with it, was encouraging more transparency, as they were doing with me, to see what really was going on. But that was, I think, somewhat difficult for them because they'd been the subject of attacks throughout the history of the organization. Did you ask David where his wife is? Actually, I knew where she was. Did you meet her? I did. As far as I knew, she was perfectly fine. You know, there was a lot of hype, a tremendous amount of hype, all surrounding these things. And why did that exist? Because it drew attention. Because as part of our entertainment media, we've created a system where we allow people to say things and sometimes we don't hold their feet to the fire to make sure they're true within that environment. So I think, you know, while, again, back to your question of why did Lawrence Wright do this, did the CIA have a particular interest in denigrating the church or tearing them down? I don't think the CIA needed to do that. They'd had enough rough publicity throughout their history. But what was more interesting was whether or not this was just an opportunistic kind of thing for Lawrence Wright and for Alex Gibney, the documentarian, both who are involved in journalistic work on the war on terror and other major issues. It did seem out of place to me that they should decide that this was a topic that was important enough or that the church was, as they said, dangerous, that that much attention should go into the organization. Yes, and I agree with you that your whole thing is objective journalism, and these are hit pieces on Scientology. They're not objective, and they should be interpreted as hit pieces. It doesn't mean that some parts of it aren't true, but clearly there's a motivation to frame things a certain way. Now, I think David and his wife need to just start a YouTube channel. It's very easy to get in front of the public and be transparent if you want to be, but that's their problem. I did want to say when you mentioned building on prior momentum, that is a big one, kind of like we talked about selecting what's acceptable. You see going clear become this big phenomenon, and you're like, well, maybe I'll write my Scientology book, and I know how to frame it because I know what makes itself popular. And so, yeah, that happens. We talk about that with history so much. There's a lot of stuff about history. The further you go back, the more it's true that we have perceptions, and when you dig, dig, dig down into the sources, it'll be like one book that was written in ancient Greece. Now, what are you going to do? We don't have other sources. We can't go back. You know, the time has passed. But it's still interesting that a lot of big chunks of history are based off of a book, a document, and you don't know what that person's motivations were. You don't know if they were being objectively true or if they were crafting a narrative for their government or, you know, their intelligence operation. But yet, it's what we have to go on, and that framing of it is just completely stripped away. And you'll have a thousand books written about ancient Greece or about the Egyptians, and it's all just like, well, we use these three original authors as the source every time. And it's like, well, those people are long gone. They can't even be vetted. But to just assume that that's the objective truth is a little sketchy. Well, you hit an important point. And one of the things I've learned from trying to get on the inside of organizations, there are a lot of myths in history that we just accept as being true, and we rely on them and we make decisions based on those myths. One of the most interesting examples in my long career that I've seen was the history of the Chicago mob, of organized crime in Chicago. And I developed a relationship with an individual many years ago. He was a colorful character. He was Italian. I met him in northern Indiana, actually met his son, and then over a course of time, I got to know him in ever better ways. And being a colorful character and entertaining the way he was, speaking as he did with his Italian accent and his rough character nature, I would never have guessed that he would turn out to be one of the primary movers within organized crime in Chicago. The first introduction I had to him was in the kitchen of a farmhouse in northern Indiana, and his first words to me when I was introduced to him by his son was, all journalists are liars. And, you know, I'd never met him, ever talked to him, and that was the first words out of his mouth. He knew I was a journalist, but he didn't know much about me, but all journalists were liars. Well, we developed that theme over a period of years, and the idea behind his attitude was that one of the most significant myths involving the Chicago mob was that Al Capone ran the Chicago mob in the 1920s and 30s. Eventually, I wrote a book I haven't published as yet. I'm still working on the manuscript, but the individual who actually ran the Chicago mob was not even Italian. He was a Russian Jew, Jake Kuzik. And he's billed in history as the account for Al Capone. That is a complete myth. Capone was muscle for the organization. Jake Kuzik was there when Capone arrived on the scene, and he was there long after Capone departed the scene. He took care of Capone, but he believed in loyalty, and he believed in the workings of a criminal network that relied on politics, culture, and a lot of other things. Jake Kuzik was a genius of organization, and he's the man that took the mob from the days of prohibition into gambling in Las Vegas and to other criminal networks throughout the country. And so the myth of Capone was created by American newspapers. And the reason that I think journalists believe that Al Capone was the head of the Chicago mob was because he talked to them, and he presented as if he was in charge. And they accepted that idea. But their reporting then became historical fact and known around the world. You know, you travel in France and talk about being an American. They say, oh, Al Capone. Yeah, right. The history of America and the American mob. It's all about Al Capone. It wasn't about Al Capone at all. It was about a much more intensive network involving people that nobody realized were involved in organized crime. Yeah, I've heard you talk about that before. definitely planned to ask you because to say that a Russian Jew was the head of the Chicago mob is such a head scratcher. But then it also makes you think about all the media that has been made since. The Sopranos, the Godfather, all this stuff. Why are these household names? It's like, well, they just kind of prop up the same old myth, this myth that like, OK, run with that. Yeah, run with that. Because I'm sure the mob had their own organizations of ways to kind of protect themselves. Clearly they did because Jake Guzik isn't the household name. They put out a Patsy, so to speak. But I wanted to go back to predictive programming, something you kind of mentioned with Wright's novels and his screenwriting. So he he writes these nonfiction books. Then he peppers in all these fictional books as well. And there's a part in your book where you mentioned that he was on Morning Joe on MSNBC to talk about this recent novel that he wrote where there is a fictional pandemic that, as they said, is like, wow, that's pretty on the nose for what actually happened. And then you have the siege where he predicted a New York terrorist attack two years before 9-11. It's like, man, clearly it seems as if he's being fed information from his intelligence network as to events that might occur. And just that fact, just to say that you could see this kind of stuff, people expect these to be completely organic, random events. I mean, the terrorist attack in New York, no one's supposed to know about that except like the network of terrorists who did it. Right. And then the pandemic, no one's supposed to know about that because it's just a random, well, probably a lab leak or you could say the bat thing. But either way, it's like a event that happened that wasn't premeditated. So just that alone is interesting. But I wonder why you would do it. There's also people suspect Ian Fleming, who had all his success with the James Bond novels. He's a guy who comes from a wealthy banking family whose father was in parliament. Then there's the famous example of the novel Futility about an unsinkable ship called the Titan that mirrors the sinking of the Titanic. That guy who wrote that was in the Navy and apparently, according to his Wikipedia page, the uncredited inventor of the Periscope. So these people are always really close to the network that they are writing a fictional story about. And then a real event happens. I guess my question is like, why allow that? Because it just seems like such a vulnerability. You already have the public captured and you can capture the media and make them believe any fictitious narrative about events that you want. Why allow people to write fictional stories that come true? Because it's just it is just a vulnerability. Like people like us are looking at this like, OK, well, then these are all premeditated plans. And events that are connected to this intelligence network. Why leave yourself open like that? What does that do? You know, it's interesting that, you know, we look backwards when we observe these things and we see something that occurred. And then we backfill the story with what we believe is true or what we think may be true. There's a lot of opportunity, I think, to reach conclusions by what we are able to see when we are not able to see the detail behind it. And that's where investigative reporting comes in to this mix, because most people don't have the time or the inclination to get behind the story to understand what's going on. And so they're very susceptible to the powerful reporting that goes on by mainstream media. And as we talked about, not just magazines and newspapers, when they were still vigorous, or television, but also the entertainment media and the presenting of ideas that we find acceptable. You're talking about organized crime and the godfather. You know, I've read that the individual who originally put together the book that turned into the movies really had no exposure to organized crime. Didn't know anybody in organized crime, but was able to piece together a fairly accurate picture of some things, because some generalized ideas are based in fact. But when we go backward and we look at the detail of things and try to pull apart in an investigative way what the structure is, we begin to find things that are not obvious to us and are telling in seeing this world in a sharper focus. I think those people who have been cooperative with the intelligence community as journalists, those people who are nurtured or encouraged by that intelligence apparatus, are not always witty about their participation. They may not know where certain attitudes are coming from or who it is that's really encouraging their development. And this is, I think, something that's important to realize. Not everything a writer writes is being controlled, dictated, or necessarily influenced or colored by this amorphous organization that seeks to promote Western cultural values. But they are in a position where their voice becomes more authoritative. And so they may be choosing what it is that they're interested in and what they're writing about, but certain aspects of culture and certain parts of society, certain parts of the American attitude are promoted within their work in particular ways. And those ideas become acceptable, those become the norm, those are what we expect to be part of our culture. And yet, when we pull apart some of the ideas behind them, some of the myths that color history, we begin to see things in a slightly different way. Part of what worries me a bit, I think, about writing about these things and trying to define them and to actually name names of people who are involved with these programs and those sorts of things, as we come up with the attitude that everything in individual rights may be of importance to the intelligence community, I don't think that's accurate. I think those particular attitudes, like the war on terror, promoting the idea that America is so at risk that we need more surveillance, more domestic surveillance, we need more intelligence going on into our own individual lives, that we can justify that because of the threat from the outside. Well, what is that threat from the outside? How real is that threat? How important is it to our daily lives? if it's going to influence what we find as acceptable, what we consider as acceptable limitations on our liberty, on our freedom to speak, on our ability to share ideas. Those are the things that are more in the shadows that are never quite clearly visible to us. Yeah, well said. That's a big part of it. And I've interviewed a lot of journalists who now find themselves on the outside and maybe once didn't. And so often the story is publisher says, we want you to write a book about X. The person says, okay, sure, it's a paycheck. This is my employer. They write that book and then a copy editor changes certain parts of it, takes out a chapter or two that the journalist might have thought was their best chapter. And then the book goes out and then they're offered the next job. And it's just like, you can either go with the flow and have a nice career or you can say, actually, I don't like the way you manipulated that. Now you're stuck doing interviews with me. That's kind of the way you get morning Joe or you get Greg Carlwood, but you don't get both. But yeah, so often it is just like it's not explicit. It's just kind of suggested. And it's like they're almost trained by the publisher to be like, this is the kind of book we want. And they always have the people in place to chisel the work down to what they want to put out. It's the unseen hand, the hidden hand that really is directing the myths of life. And just to violate what you said about, well, maybe not all the work is important. I got to thinking about Lawrence Wright's predictive abilities and I looked into his two most recent novels. One came out in 2023 called Mr. Texas, NPR's best book of the year, by the way, about a rancher who becomes a politician. I don't know. I couldn't think of much there. Obviously, I haven't read the book. But then The Human Scale is a book of his, a novel that comes out next year that centers around the newfound and forced relationship between a Palestinian-American FBI agent and a hardline Israeli cop working together uneasily to solve the murder of an Israeli police chief in Gaza. I don't know if there's any clues or insights there, any predictive programming that might happen, but it's clearly a highly charged subject that's very in the news right now. And if I was a police chief in Gaza, I'd probably watch my back. I will say that. But I also read that the events of October 7th with the parachuting shooters and the music festival, that is a scene in the book. That's in the marketing material for it. So cementing that as history in a certain perspective and, you know, maybe the police chief in Gaza, we'll see how he fares in the next few years. But clearly there's some perception management going on within that story just based on how highly charged that area of the world and that particular story and set of circumstances seems to be right now. Well, I think it's fascinating that we have in Lawrence Wright a journalist who also does literature and is writing about similar subjects, both on nonfiction and a fictional basis. And so I think, you know, most of us take a look at our fiction writers, our creative writers in this country, and we think, well, they're sitting around in their den, they're coming up with creative ideas, they're researching out the popular things in the news, they're looking to write things that are timely, and they're working on creativity. But when your other role is as a journalist and you are developing sources in areas where most people don't have access, it does give you an opportunity to know things that perhaps are not on the horizon of other people. So perhaps in the course of that, if you're doing journalism and you're interviewing people in the State Department, or you're interviewing people in the CIA, or you're interviewing people in the federal government, whatever level, in, say, biology and immune science, you're going to come up with ideas from talking with people that may lead to fictional work. That seems perfectly natural, perfectly appropriate. But when you back up a little bit and you ask yourself, gee, how do you get on the inside of these organizations? How do you get access? How do you get trusted enough by the CIA, maybe, that they take you inside and show you the secret documents, right? So that's a lovely thing as a journalist. If you're independent and you're developing those kind of sources, you're doing good work and you're doing work the way it should be done to develop those sources. But if you have secret connections, if you have insider access that other journalists are getting, if you're allowed into the room where the discussions about the future of America are on the table and you don't acknowledge that access or you don't let your reader know about that kind of access, I think that creates a little different situation. So, you know, is Lawrence Wright just a prescient individual? Does he just happen upon these ideas and happen to write these major books about issues that are confronting us all? I can't tell you how that exactly works with Lawrence Wright, and part of the reason I can't is because he won't answer any questions that I have for him. But I think we can draw clues, and that's what I've done all my life as an investigative reporter is I've tried to establish one thing that's true and then another thing that relates to that that is also true. And you build blocks of information that way, to which you can come to some kind of reliable conclusion. And so, what I conclude about Lawrence Wright's history as a writer is he had extraordinary access to things that most writers, most journalists don't necessarily get. He participated in programs that were used to develop journalistic friends by the intelligence community. He had direct family ties to these organizations that were developed through systems and networks, and he never disclosed them. If he'd have disclosed them, if he'd have said, well, my father was employed by Robert Story, and look who he was, and all that, that's one thing. To hide that is something else entirely, which leads us to suspicions about things we don't know or can't determine. You know, I asked Lawrence Wright several times, and I wrote him a letter before the book was published, and I outlined exactly what I was going to report in this book and asked for his commentary, and he would not respond, nor would many other people in that literary circle respond to those kind of questions. Yeah, I thought that was really interesting, your personal interactions with Wright. But, yeah, on one hand, people don't bite the hand that feeds, but when you omit certain things from your biography, and these things are highly charged, it does lead to suspicions. But, man, this has been really, really great. It is about that time I let you go, but definitely tell us about any previous work or any ways people should follow you online or how to keep tabs on what you might be working on down the line. Well, I've published another book besides a Maniturian journalist, a collection of columns. It's called Street Talk. And it has the contributions that I made to the Pulitzer that was won by the four-way new Sentinel for coverage of floods in that city. Are we going to have to check out your own Pulitzer and see how legitimate that is? Yeah. Well, yeah, everybody go check. Take a look. But I'm also working on a film project out of Indiana, my home state, doing a documentary film on a series of cold case crimes from the late 1970s in Speedway, Indiana, in the shadow of the Indianapolis 500. Five murders never solved and a string of bombings that resulted in a conviction of an individual, which I have discovered was a wrongful conviction. Police corruption was involved in that and the effort to target this individual. And so we're working on a hopefully a 10-part documentary that will look get into that corruption and into why these crimes are never solved. Okay. I like that. It's the stories we don't hear, but they don't surprise us either when we eventually do. Seems to be a tale as old as time. Corruption, misdirection. Man, well, this has been a serious pleasure. I know it's a marathon session around here, so I'll let you get on with the day, but keep fighting the good fight and take care. Well, thanks, Greg. Thanks for having me on. I enjoyed it. And there we have it, a swing back into the good, old, reliable world of practical, down-to-earth, nuts-and-bolts media manipulation. And what a time to remind people just how deep this goes when everything is in full swing and we're staring down the barrel of a national election just about two months away. Dan really is the man, even though I wasn't familiar with the name Lawrence Wright when I took this on. And I'm certainly familiar with his overall influence. And I think looking at him as a template does a lot of good. I mean, hell, Lawrence Wright was a guest on JRE, biggest podcast in the world, just over a month ago. He's still very influential. And I do think the Scientology stuff is weird. I know I'm a bit biased in my distaste for religions and cults in general. But if I step back from it, I guess I don't know too much about Scientology itself in an objective sense. And really, if people want to believe something or be a part of something voluntarily, that's their business. But it's just a good thought exercise, I guess, to think, hey, did I form my own opinions objectively about something like Scientology or have I just gone along with the crowd? And if there is this big cultural mono opinion, why is that just something to think about, regardless of the little micro stories like Danny Masterson and the new Linkin Park singer, et cetera, et cetera. Obviously, this interview and this episode isn't even about Scientology itself. It was just Dan's entry point into Lawrence Wright's work. And given Wright's background, this was an interesting first gig to burst out onto the scene with you can decide for yourself why that might have been where the government intelligence networks getting a little paranoid about the intelligence gathering of the Scientology organization and they thought they needed a hit piece on him, maybe. Or perhaps he was tasked with doing one genuine esque kind of story, some hip counterculture thing to get the journalistic street cred. Would he be on Joe Rogan's podcast if he didn't write Going Clear? Probably not. Maybe Going Clear was written so he could just pepper in little bits and pieces about his other work. It's a curious thing. And even Dan kind of leaves that open. He does seem like a good old fashioned journalist. Hey, I don't have a dog in any fight. I'm just trying to do the research and put out the findings. But the reality is you only need a couple dozen Lawrence Wrights to control narratives on pretty much everything. The system will prop them up and convince most people that they are the journalistic authorities. And Bob's your uncle. I would also have to say I never heard that the head of the Chicago mob was a Russian Jew. But like so many things, does the real head of the snake ever get cut off or ever get held accountable? Not really. So even though it's new information, in a way it doesn't really surprise me. But if you like the free first hour, as always, join Plus to hear the full two hour show. Today's Plus side added a lot of stuff to the Mockingbird media pile. We also talked about some wild stories from Dan's journalistic past working on prison corruption and abuses and child abuses in juvenile centers and stories from befriending this mobster who told him all this insider knowledge. I had a great time with Dan and I'm very happy with how it all turned out. And I'm always happy to promote a new book from Trine Day as icing on the cake. They're doing the Lord's work, so to speak. And when it comes to the last episode with Matt Roski, obviously we never make everyone happy. But when I put out a show that even has a few comments about it being a new personal favorite, that's a win. And there were a few people who said Matt was a new favorite. And overall, the rating is a 4.7. Pretty much where all of them land. Lucky for me, I'm not complaining. But again, we're probably gonna seek out a ratings plug-in that allows for more variance and nuance. I'm sick of patting myself on the back all the time, you know? But right now, this is what we got. And 4.7 obviously means I'm doing all right. But let's jump over to the meetups on the books. It seems like coming up on the 18th, we got Corner Bakery Cafe in Pasadena. September 19th, Coral Tree in LA. October 14th, Gilderbrath's Ale House in Eden, Terrence, Auckland, New Zealand. And then November 9th, Trails Cafe in LA. Wow. Four meetups on the books, three in the LA area, and one in New Zealand. Man, it's a big world out there. I wish more people had an interest in meeting other like-minded folks. But I just provide the opportunity. The website is there and open to anyone. And the rest of it just is what it is. But Dan was super great. I hope he feels the love from you guys. He seems to be in the final chapters of a very long and altruistic career that sometimes seems like it might have been a bit thankless. But hey, we know the kinds of people that get on the front page and get onto primetime and get propped up by the system. So it is what it is. I'm glad he wrote this book calling a lot of that out. So until next time, that's it for me. I've done my part. Your move, Mockingbird Media Agents, Intelligence Tide, Informants, Propagandists, and Predictive Programmers. Your fucking move. It's a vital step in an important day. Because the stories of our lives, we must reclaim them. They stole the truth and sold us lies. But who can blame? We neglect it all so much. We left the laser. Gotta kill the monster. All aboard. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. pp