W. Niederhut

Earth to Ben... 🤥

Greg, I'm somewhat skeptical of a tabloid story written three decades after the trial, but I'll look into it. As I recall, the Hardup robbery/murder case was tried in court and the hypnotist, Bjorn Nielsen, was actually convicted of the crime and sent to prison! Hardrup, himself was sentenced to a mental institution. Dissociative phenomena and hypnosis may seem far-fetched to people who haven't observed it. As with many psychiatric phenomena, people really need to directly observe and talk to afflicted patients to understand the phenomenology. That is true of schizophrenia, mania, delusional disorders, and dissociative disorders. I first came into direct contact with patients suffering from multiple personality disorders on a private hospital ward here in the Denver metro area where I worked as a psychiatrist in the late 1980s. The ward was a rare specialty inpatient unit for adult patients with MPD. I was a bit puzzled and skeptical about MPD when I first worked on that ward in on-call coverage. Patients would talk to me with the voices, personalities, and behavior of young children or teenagers, alternating with adult personas. At first, I thought it was all fake. In time, I came to realize that the dissociative phenomena, and switching between alters, was absolutely real. I also began to realize that we are all comprised of "alter" ego states/personalities -- a 5 year old self, a 12 year old, various adults, etc.-- but those of us who were not unduly traumatized developmentally have a relatively integrated experience of ourselves over time, without amnesia for experiences in various alters. As for hypnotic suggestibility and programming in susceptible people, I think it's quite real. Milton Erickson has several volumes of case studies on the subject, which are extremely interesting. Estabrooks' 1943 Hypnosis textbook is also worth reading, and contains numerous case examples. He also discusses your questions about hypnosis in crime and warfare in considerable detail. Estabrook pointedly disagreed with Milton Erickson about the issue of whether susceptible people could be hypnotically conditioned to commit murders. The American hypnotist William Joseph Bryan also disagreed with Milton Erickson on this question.

Hey, Ben, how many Congressional Democrats voted for the December 2017 Trump/GOP Tax Cuts for Billionaires & Healthcare Demolition Act? Any clue? Do tell. Weren't you recently posting something about the working class? Wealthy Democrats like the Kennedy and Pelosi families may, in fact, have money, but your ad hominem focus on their private wealth completely ducks the issue of their political policy positions. It's an old Republican straw man. The fallacy is the implication that, "Because Senator (or Representative) So-and-so is wealthy, he or she doesn't represent the interests of the working class." How, then, do you explain the political policies of the Kennedy family-- including the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid? See if you can figure that one out.

Never trust a Donk, Ben. Before we know it, Nancy Pelosi and the Gazpacho Police will probably be forcing us to eat paella... 🤥

We should have known that nefarious Nancy Pelosi is a cold soup lover... 🤥

Jim, After reading George Estabrooks' 1943 Hypnosis textbook this week, I strongly suspect that Estabrooks may have worked with Angleton and the CIA to program Oswald for counterespionage work in Angleton's false defector program. The parallels with Estabrooks' theories on the subject are striking. Is that, perhaps, why the CIA had so many pre-assassination Oswald files? I need to go back and re-read John Newman's book on Oswald and the CIA.

Greg and Richard, If you want to understand what really happened with Sirhan and RFK's assassination, read Lisa Pease's excellent book, A Lie Too Big to Fail. The book covers everything in exhaustive detail-- witness testimony, ballistics, accomplices, Sirhan's hypnosis, and the LAPD (and FBI) cover up of the evidence. Her chapter on "Mind Games" is a stellar review of history and references on the subject of Estabrook's Manchurian candidate hypnosis protocols and the related literature. Sirhan was, definitely, a patsy/decoy who was hypnotically programmed to fire blanks in the Ambassador Hotel pantry. And RFK was, obviously, murdered by gun shots fired at point blank range by someone behind him-- evidently, Ace Security guard, Thane Eugene Cesar. Sirhan was in a hypnotically-conditioned alter state called, "Range Mode" when he fired his blanks, and he had bona fide psychogenic amnesia for the incident, and for his pre-assassination hypnosis sessions. There was a "cue" signal that activated his "Range Mode" alter state-- probably relating to the girl in the polka dot dress. Estabrooks described the technical aspects of this kind of programming in his 1943 Hypnosis textbook. It only works in people who are susceptible to deep hypnosis-- less than 20% of the population. As for confirmed cases of a person being hypnotically programmed to commit a crime, (including murder) the answer is a definite, "Yes." One well known case was that of a Danish man named Palle Hardrup, who was hypnotized and conditioned to rob a bank in the 1940s. In the course of the robbery, Hardup murdered a teller and bank manager. https://paradigmsalon.net/palle-hardruphardwick/ Two famous, highly reputable doctors, Milton Erickson and Martin Orne, opined during their careers that people could not be hypnotized and induced to commit murders. (I met Martin Orne in 1988 when he consulted on a murder case at our Colorado State Hospital.) What I did not realize until the past week, thanks to Ron Bulman, is that Orne worked on a CIA MK-ULTRA contract during his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania. Erickson also, evidently worked with the CIA. In his 1943 Hypnosis textbook, Estabrooks explicitly disagreed with Milton Erickson's opinion that people could not be hypnotized and conditioned to commit murders. I now suspect that Erickson and Orne may have deliberately lied to help cover up Manchurian candidate ops used by the CIA (and, possibly, the ONI.)

And not only did Estabrooks do it, he was pitching his theories and proposals to the U.S. military during WWII. Estabrooks' proposals for using his techniques in counterintelligence ops must have intrigued James Angleton in the 1950s. I wonder if Estabrooks and Angleton arranged for the young Marine, Lee Harvey Oswald, to become an early subject for this kind of counterintelligence programming-- hypnotically inducing an alter A that is an enthusiastic communist, but has amnesia for the induction, while a secondary alter B has full awareness of A's observations and activity.

Not only that, but I think I just discovered why Ben brought up Hunter Biden's laptop in the context of this week's big news about Trump's history of illegally removing White House documents to Mar-a-Lago, shredding documents, and using "burn bags..." 🤥 Ben is keeping us fully informed of "news" from the alternate Fox MAGA-verse...

Ron, Thanks for posting this. I've discovered a few references about Estabrooks this week, but I hadn't seen this one. It's the first I've heard about Estabrooks' contact with J. Edgar Hoover, and his comments about Oswald and Ruby.

Here's another good one, Ron.

Good question. I haven't studied the two Gerald Ford assassination attempts in any detail, or the George Wallace/Bremer case, which prevented Wallace from siphoning critical votes from Nixon. I also wonder about the John Hinckley, Jr. case, which, if successful, would have put "Mr. George Bush of the CIA" in the Oval Office. The Sirhan case seems to offer the clearest evidence of Manchurian candidate programming, to my knowledge. I also wonder about Oswald, in relation to Estabrooks' 1943 description of programming counterintelligence spies with amnestic pro-communist alters. Estabrooks even referred to using his protocol on a Marine.

Never trust a Donk, Ben. Here's the proof... 🤥

ROTFL... 🤣 O.K., I needed a good laugh today, Kirk. I can't really picture Jeff in an 18 wheeler, but I can picture him suavely rationalizing a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Get a clue, Ben. First of all, the Democratic Party is hardly monolithic. Bernie Sanders and our progressive wing came very close to winning a majority in both the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries. The progressive vote was, unfortunately, split in 2020 between Bernie and Elizabeth Warren, then Michael Bloomberg and the DNC establishment aggressively intervened to sabotage the progressive juggernaut on Super Tuesday. Progressive Democrats, in contrast to the Koch-controlled GOP and Wall Street Democrats, absolutely represent the interests of working people in America-- e.g., affordable healthcare, living wages, affordable education, etc. No one else really does. Certainly not the Koch GOP and its current policy-free Trump cult. There is no meaningful equivalence between progressive Democrats and the Koch GOP. None. For those who were paying attention in late 2017, liberal economists strongly opposed the proposed Trump GOP "trickle down" tax cut bill for several reasons. 1) The Bush/Cheney "supply side" tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 had largely created our burgeoning national debt, without significantly stimulating U.S. GDP and private sector job growth. Both GDP and private sector job growth in the U.S. were far more robust in the 1990s after Clinton and the Democrats increased the top tax rates in 1993 (by a 51-50 Senate vote, with Al Gore casting the tie breaker.) 2) There have never been any provisions in the Republican/Reaganomic tax cut bills (since the 1980s) to incentivize job creation in the U.S. -- as opposed to rebated tax dollars flowing to cheaper labor markets in the Third World. This was also true of the 2017 Trump/GOP tax cut bill. In fact the Trump/GOP tax cut bill cut billions in taxes for foreign investors. And, like George W. Bush, Trump had the worst private sector job growth record in modern Presidential history. As for the problem of Rupert Murdoch, Breitbart, OANN, Newsmax, and destructive mass media disinformation in the modern U.S., something must be done. The disinformation is, literally, killing us-- not only in the case of COVID disinformation, but in the M$M denial of catastrophic climate change. IMO, the public interest is never optimized by the de-regulation of unscrupulous, for-profit industries-- including media corporations. Their central motive is to maximize profits, not to inform the public and/or promote the public welfare. We used to have the Fairness Act, but Reagan abolished the Fairness Act, which required major news corporations to provide equal time to opposing viewpoints on issues of public policy. Now we have Fox News and other partisan propaganda outlets creating polarized subcultures.

Ben, Do some remedial reading on the subject. Trump is actually quite the stage hypnotist, and he has, obviously, succeeded in establishing an obedient, devoted cult. They hear and obey their Great Leader. He can make them believe absurdities and even commit atrocities, as we have seen. Under the bright lights on stage, he incites strong emotion in the mob-- mostly fear, anger, and derision-- then implants the suggestion that he alone can keep the cult safe and prosperous in exchange for obedience. But this thread is not really about Trump. I only mentioned Trump in relation to Estabrooks' scholarly, contemporaneous insights about Hitler in 1943. The crucial point about Estabrooks is that he was, evidently, the Godfather of Manchurian candidate protocols used by MK-ULTRA, and possibly the ONI.

P.S. Oswald sounds suspiciously like a paradigmatic case in Estabrooks' 1943 text-- a spy who is hypnotically programmed to adopt an alter personality A as an enthusiastic communist, with a core personality B as a patriotic anti-communist. A has no consciousness of B, but B is conscious of A.

Geez, Ben... Hang it up, already. More of your typical false equivalence. Hunter Biden has had some serious problems, including cocaine addiction and the traumatic death of his mother at a young age. He's not the POTUS, and he didn't incite a violent attack on the U.S. Congress or try to steal a U.S. election.

Ron, While reading George Estabrooks' 1943 Hypnosis text this week, I kept wondering if Oswald was carrying out some activities-- perhaps as early as his Russian "defection," and as late as Dallas-- as post-hypnotic compulsions. I thought I had read somewhere that David Ferrie had hypnotized Oswald, but this is the first time I've heard anything about Ferrie being in contact with the notorious William Joseph Bryan. I wonder if Bryan, himself, had been in contact with Oswald.

Forget the popcorn. Donald Trump and a number of his GOP accomplices have, apparently, committed some very serious crimes. This is not a fabricated scandal, like Benghazi, or like Kenneth Starr and Brett Kavanaugh's five year White Water "investigation" of Bill Clinton's private life.

Matt, The conventional wisdom, promoted by such luminaries as Milton Erickson and Martin Orne, is that people can't be hypnotically induced to commit murders. That's why Estabrooks' scholarly 1943 text is such a shocker for me. My wife, a Ph.D. psychologist, was also surprised to hear about Estabrooks' theories.

I just finished reading the out-of-print 1943 Hypnosis textbook by Canadian-American psychologist Dr. George Estabrooks, which may be of interest to people interested in the subject of the Kennedy (MLK, Wallace, Malcolm X) assassinations, "Manchurian candidates," and CIA Operation MK-ULTRA. I had never even heard of George Estabrooks before recently reading Lisa Pease's book, A Lie Too Big to Fail, which is a bit puzzling, since I am a Board Certified psychiatrist familiar with the well known writings of Milton Erickson and the work of Martin Orne, who I met in 1988. I was even more puzzled when I realized that Estabrooks' astonishing 1943 Hypnosis textbook is out-of-print and, apparently, little known in psychiatric circles. Fortunately, I found a copy of the book at SCRIBD. It was so interesting that I couldn't put it down yesterday and today until I had read it cover-to-cover. https://www.scribd.com/document/491428492/G-H-Estabrooks-Hypnotism-ocr The first thing to note is that Estabrooks was a very scholarly, Harvard-educated psychologist (and Rhodes scholar) who had vast knowledge of the 19th and early 20th century scientific literature on hypnosis. He also had extensive clinical experience hypnotizing suitable subjects. Secondly, he had reached out to the U.S. War Department during WWII about his theories regarding the potential military uses of hypnosis, and had, apparently, received a warm welcome. No further details offered, for obvious reasons. The third thing is that he pointedly disagreed with Milton Erickson that hypnosis could not be used to "program" suitable subjects to become military couriers, spies, agents of counter espionage, saboteurs, and even assassins-- in 1943! (Well before the Korean War Chinese "brainwashing" narrative became prominent in the U.S.) Was Estabrooks the intellectual Godfather of MK-ULTRA's assassination ops? Was his work deliberately suppressed, as a consequence? As an aside, his 1943 textbook also contains a truly spellbinding contemporaraneous analysis of Adolph Hitler's use of stage hypnosis techniques to manipulate N-A-Z-I crowds. The parallels with what Donald Trump has been doing in the U.S. are eerie.

I'm currently doing some remedial reading on the history of MK-Ultra, and it sounds like "Dirty Dick" Helms was involved with the project(s) from the beginning.

What a coincidence, Steve. Donald Trump also has no platform other than supporting Donald Trump. 🤪