Church and Pike Commissions
The Church and Pike Commissions were two parallel committees run in the US House and Senate investigating illegal activities by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the 1970's.
References and Links: Church Committee:
Pike Committee:
Quotes
I've tried to document the ways in which people have been brought down before, and he last time we really cleaned house and the intelligence community was in the mid-seventies with the Church & Pike commissions. And we learned a ton about these untraceable ways that a Goliath--which sometimes is emergent and sometimes conscious--can take somebody down and you don't realize that the story that got written about you was planted by the government. And if that sounds crazy to you, you actually have a problem because this is fully documented. There's no conspiracy theory. This is âconspiracy factâ. What we don't know is what happened since Church/Pike.
And this is why, for example, with the Nunes memoâI think it's completely a partisan stunt, it's a partisan stunt that may actually have an underlying reality as wellâthose two things are not one--you can't say, "well, because it's a partisan stunt, then I don't want to investigate."
So there's this thing where Eisenhower said: âbeware of the military-industrial complexâ in his final farewell address. I would say that this needs to be updated to be aware of what I call TIM: Technology, Intelligence, and Media.
And there's something about the fact that all of our personal information is housed on the servers of a few large tech companies. The intelligence community has not been vigorously, vigorously, vigorously investigated for a very long time, and media is in some sort of relationship to both of those that we don't understand. My real concern is that the people who threatened the dominant âGated Institutional Narrativeâ, have to beware of TIM: technology, intelligence, and media working behind the scenes in ways that we don't understand, which is the expectation, post Church/Pike commissions. That is, the default should be that this is the way the world normally works, that wasn't an anomaly, and if you believe that that doesn't happen anymore--absolutely--then the burden of proof is on you. If you want to take it up, please. But otherwise we have to imagine that fundamentally we're all vulnerable to having all of our email in a Gmail account, all of our personal interactions in our Facebook account, what we are doing with direct messages, being read by Twitter engineers. You know, I don't love James O'Keefe, but he seems to have unearthed some stuff at Twitter. We should be very, very worried.
-Eric Weinstein on The Rubin Report @ 1 hr 48 min
On X
2016
@mikejcasey @balajis This is fascinating. It doesn't square with anything I know. Church commission. Mockingbird. Bernstein on CIA. Etc...
2017
2/ The only time we have tried "draining the swamp" of the US DeepState in memory was around the so-called Church Committee in the mid '70s.
@OwenBenjamin Rosenstrasse protest
McCollum memo
COINTELPRO, Jean Seberg, Fake News, MSM and Church/Pike
Witold Pilecki
Johann Trollmann
Powell Memorandum
Operation Mockingbird
Meena Keshwar Kamal
2018
So, having lived through the Church commission revelations of Cointelpro inside FBI, I want the safe parts of the memo released so I can see if itâs a big deal over nothing. Thus, Iâm for releasing the memo and hoping the #ReleaseTheMemo movement is a stunt. But it may not be...
2019
1/ WE NEED A NEW CHURCH COMMITTEE: Fred Hampton Edition.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the US assassination of our own citizen Fred Hampton, inventor of the Rainbow Coalition. This year is the 40th anniversary of our killing of Jean Seberg via the FBI direction of our Press.
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2/ With the inexplicable âPerfect Stormâ death of Jeffrey Epstein & likely govt direction of our corporate press not to seek categorical denial of our intelligence community w regard to ANY link to Jeffrey Epsteinâs pedophilia & traffic in minors, we MUST investigate our own IC.
3/ We would never have learned about our own Government crimes against MLK Jr, Dick Gregory, Jean Seberg, Fred Hampton & others if we the people were not in control of our permanent Government class.
Without investigation, the people are no longer in control of our Govenrment.
4/ Whatâs the emergency? Itâs the silence & bizarre behavior around Epstein:
Q1: Ghislaine Maxwell has a passport. Where and when was it last recorded and why is this of interest to no corporate media?
Q2: Where is the categorical denial or refusal to comment on IC ties to JE?
5/ Q3: Prince Andrewâs interview is close to the most bizarre thing Iâve ever seen on video. Those questions were all expected. What was that?
Fred Hampton reminds us that our permanent class in Govât can kill extrajudicially. Jean Seberg reminds us it uses our press against us.
6/ Learn to listen for the âsounds of silenceâ. Silence around @AndrewYang and @TulsiGabbard. Silence around Ghislaine. Silence around Epsteinâs Villard House office in NYC and trading records. Silence around IC ties. And silence around the Church & Pike Committees. #BackToChurch
End/ Iâm calling on @AndrewYang, @BernieSanders, @TulsiGabbard & other Mavericks to LEAD the charge asking about the silence reaching epidemic proportions. Itâs time to investigate ourselves which has always been A NORMAL PART OF DEMOCRACY. It has nothing to do w tinfoil đ©s.đ
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2020
What have I been telling you all for years? The DISC is real.
Wake the hell up. It is time for Church/Pike II. What is the hold up?
Republicans: put up or shut up. Stop talking âred-pillingâ. Start an investigation of TIM: Tech-Intelligence-Media.
#BackToChurch #SlipTheDISC
2021
It is time for a return to a second version of the Church and Pike Committees.
To regulate speech companies or provide a public version of Twitter, FaceBook and Google as well as ISPs so that our speech cannot be throttled according to anything other than the laws of our nation.
Normally I would think that our interests would be best served by self-investigation of the IC through redoing the Church/Pike Committees.
But given the hands closing around the throat of free unsurveiled action and open idea exchange, pardoning Assange and Snowden makes sense.
Or more simply put: if our bizarre press and elected representatives refuse to ASK about Jeffrey Epsteinâs links to the Intelligence world, what choice do we have but pardoning those who do the work abdicated by government & the press while they cowardly refuse to do their jobs?
I should also say that the problem isnât as simple as Assange & Snowden. Assume for the moment that they both acted in a principled fashion and did so with great care. Youâd still have the issue that pardons send a signal to less principled actors which could be catastrophic.
We need an intelligence community we can trust to *not* be open. That is the conundrum we face. How do we gain oversight and protect ourselves against a secret world that we want to remain opaque?
This is a giant liability of not being able to rest on a shared national culture.
2022
@elonmusk Been using #BackToChurch for years to call for this.
2024
Donald Trump is poised to actually overturn the order in Washington DC. Most importantly for the SuperTicket, this includes the intelligence services and covert operations groups for the first time since the Church and Pike committees of 1975-1976.
This move by McConnell is sabatoge that is at least parliamentary in nature. Quite honestly I am surprised that this is in any way surprising.
Whether it ends there or not I donât know, but I would be shocked if it did. I believe that the American people have given Donald Trump and JD Vance a mandate to overhaul Washington DC, and that this is not acceptable to many who will watch their lifeâs investment dismantled. Mandate or no mandate, I fully expect the sandbagging and sabatoge to continue.
Not to beat the same dead horse as on @PiersUncensored, but I also canât shake concern for even the physical safety of the incoming president and vice president. It feels crazy to say it, but the two shooters (particularly the second) weigh heavily in my mind. Two shooters is a lot, but there are still those who feel that any such concern is *always* a fever dream. Ignore them.
The SuperTicket is playing with fire. I would highly recommend that someone in the transition team get Gary Hart on board, who is one of the last living links to the Church Committee, and could thus advise as to what it is actually like to frontally engage the covert and intelligence operations groups in a hostile fashion.
Washington hasnât been overhauled at this level since the 1970s. I was just a kid, but I remember it as being *very* tense the last time it happened. I remember it being so crazy that we just couldnât fully process it and kinda even had to forget what we learned as a result. It was wild.
If McConnellâs move is surprising, it can get a lot worse even without any violence at all; it might pay to go back to these tumultuous hearings, as it is our only such data point in the modern era. The presidental election was likely just the beginning of âstop at nothingâ opposition to the groundswell. I remember being shocked as a kid at the pressure to prevent the public revelations of planned political killings by the Church committee. I think America has forgotten what this was like.
Hope I am wrong. Apologies if so in advance. đ
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2025
@edfrenkel @coreyum Itâs hard for people to hear it. We havenât seen this in earnest since like Iran-Contra or thereabouts. Or maybe Abu Ghraib. Dunno.
Church committee was too long ago.
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