The lessons learned from MKUltra were, it doesn't fucking work.

The ever shifting goals were nebulous at best, and often just monstrous in practice, but at no time did anything ever get accomplished.

It started as an excuse to play with LSD. For something like 10 years, the entire world's supply of LSD was funneled to the CIA and specifically wherever Sidney Gottlieb wanted it. Often this was into his own body, and the bodies of unsuspecting CIA agents who "agreed" to be secretly dosed at random via their employment contracts.

Originally they thought that LSD could be a truth serum, but that's bullshit, then they thought that they could "reprogram" people into secret agents (this plan actually came about after the Manchurian Candidate came out.) That part of things got pretty horrific, they found that through the use of torture and drugs, they could completely break a person. Putting them back together proved impossible.

Eventually MKUltra turned into dosing random people in the street or in brothels, seemingly so that one particular creep could watch.

They learned that "guys are more talkative after sex when on drugs".

It was all fucking nonsense. That's how these people work, they have some harebrained idea and then throw spaghetti at the wall, trying to make it work out. When it doesn't, they wander off assuming that someone else will clean up the mess.

All of that is separate from modern social media control programs, which work via scale. But we've known that propaganda works at scale since the beginning of history. Like everything else wrong with the modern world, it's more targeted and tracked now.

You have massive state run influence machines trying to push different narratives, and it's all just noise. But yes, there are also some dangerous elements. The whole incel culture full of people both pushing dangerous versions of right-wing ideology and preying on the insecurities of young men. I can certainly say that there are people, both employed by governments and not, who make it their lives work to infiltrate various online communities to push different talking points.

But worse is Joel Fucking Kaplan.

He was part of the program, but he was also completely cut loose.

Again I should say, MKUltra was based on nonsense paired with a reckless disregard for consequences. They didn't care how many people they hurt because hurting people was the goal. Gottlieb shredded most of the records the second accountability came calling, because it was all nonsense.

It's just like the Nazi medical experiments. One of the more infamous Nazi experiments was injecting dye into the eyes of twins to see of the other twin's eyes would change color. MKUltra was basically that level of scientific rigor, except with more LSD.

That's what made the program so dangerous, not some bullshit mind control, the reckless disregard and protection from consequences for the monsters doing the twisted and pointless experiments.