Congressional MKUltra Hearings as MAGA PSYOP

For the record, as someone who distrusts the CIA and who spent years studying MKUltra. I believe MKUltra died within the agency in the 1960s. It died because it didn’t work. The types of mind control they wanted do not exist. The most effective forms of mind control aren’t found in the science fiction tropes these 1950s and 60s CIA operations experimented with, they’re found in the pages of New York Times, broadcasts of Fox News, MSNBC, and Newsmax, and the hundreds of thousands of human and circuit-boarded bots incessantly posting on social media. Certainly, the CIA continued to do all sorts of horrible things, but beyond generating some “useful” interrogation techniques, MKUltra mostly didn’t pan out because a lot of its ideas were unsound. More

For Millions of Impoverished Americans, an Unhappy National Birthday

BY Michael Slager

Out of an approximate 755,000 unhoused people in the United States, there are no reliable estimates for the number who live in motels. I have passed by the one in the picture above (I didn’t work at this particular motel) many times; it’s in the neighborhood where I now live, and it sometimes makes me think of Anna and her family. Her kids would be adults by now, yet another generation calls such places home. More

A Hard Reset for Corporate Power

BY David S. D’Amato

Contemporary political conversations talk a lot about the problem of money in politics, but they almost never acknowledge that modern corporate power did not arise from a system of liberal rights and open competition. Even the basic corporate privilege of limited liability is far from a natural right. The state-capital complex is fundamentally a system for the manufacture of asymmetric relationships and material inequalities. The Corporate Power Reset movement restarts a long-running conversation about where power is actually located and encountered. One of the under-discussed features of our system, whatever its name, is the formal state’s delegation of much of the coercive governance of day-to-day life. More

A Lost War, a Bad Agreement and a Possible Good Outcome

BY L. Michael Hager

One thing is certain. The U.S. lost its war of choice against Iran. Trump and Netanyahu failed to eliminate the perceived Iranian nuclear threat, despite relentless bombing that killed thousands and destroyed both military assets and civilian infrastructure. The desired “regime change” left a more hawkish leader in charge. Iranian forces then deployed missiles and drones to carry out devastating attacks on American bases in the Gulf. Thirteen U.S. soldiers lost their lives. Most significantly, Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz sparked global panic in energy, fertilizer, and other vital markets. For Americans, the war meant a dollar a-gallon increase at the gas pump. For Trump, ending the war became a political imperative. More

Gaza Sunbirds w/ Karim Ali

June 26, 2026

On this episode of CounterPunch Radio, Tori Tsui talks with Karim Ali, co-founder of the Gaza Sunbirds. Karim Ali is a Palestinian award-winning community organiser and co-founder of the Gaza Sunbirds – a para-cycling team of Palestinian amputee athletes.

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The Origins of the Private Intelligence Complex w/ Barrett Brown

June 20, 2026

Award-winning journalist and author Barrett Brown returns to CounterPunch Radio to discuss the critical period before 2016 when online activism emerged, fusing with political movements and bringing down regimes. During that time, Brown became the public face of Anonymous and the burgeoning transparency movement, which led to the US Government targeting him and his eventual imprisonment. Learn the inside story of the hacking efforts, which powerful individuals and entities were exposed, how Brown and his colleagues began to unravel the complex web of relationships at the heart of the modern private military-industrial-intelligence complex, and how the State fought back. Listen and learn about the manufactured identities, the formation of the alt-right on 4chan, what was confirmed in the Epstein Files, and more.

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UFC White House and the Billionaire Alliance w/ Nate Wilcox

June 12, 2026

CounterPunch explores the upcoming UFC White House spectacle and the Hollywood, DC, and Gulf power brokers at the nexus of US politics, sports and entertainment. Host Eric Draitser welcomes veteran combat sports journalist Nate Wilcox, Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw, to the show to discuss the White House event, the mythology around Trump’s relationship with the UFC and Dana White, the role of Ari Emanuel and TKO Group in monopolizing combat sports and playing all sides of the power structure, the Gulf monarchies and their projection of soft power, the overlap between entertainment, finance, and geopolitics, and so much more.

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