Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). Unidentified Submerged Objects (USOs). Non-human spacecraft. Flying saucers. Mysterious drones that seem to evade even our most sophisticated detection systems. UFO encounters come in a wide variety of forms. Some involve experimental military aircraft and secret technologies, while others point to the serious possibility of extraterrestrial or interdimensional intelligence.

Today, files are being released. Congressional hearings are being held. New whistleblowers are stepping forward. A growing number of members of Congress on both sides of the political aisle are actively involved in UAP investigations, transparency efforts, and legislation. Following classified briefings, lawmakers have suggested that the reality behind the phenomenon may be far stranger than previously imagined, involving interdimensional beings coming and going from our planet, and even non-human underwater bases in an ocean that remains more than 80% unexplored.

Below is a section of our UFO Information Center, Reports of Breakthrough Technologies, drawing on more than 23 years of documenting the disclosure process with only the most reputable, verifiable, and credible sources. In this section, we explore the technologies being reported, considering their profound implications for our energy grid, what they might reveal about the untapped potential of human consciousness, and what that might mean for the future of civilization itself.

Whether you are a skeptic, believer, or simply curious, we invite you to explore the evidence and decide for yourself. None of us have to agree on what all of this means. We cannot control how governments, corporations, media outlets, or special interests choose to frame, manipulate, or respond to this information. We cannot control the possibility that future UAP-related events could be manufactured to generate fear, confusion, or support for a particular agenda. What we can control is how we choose to integrate this material into our everyday lives. If even a fraction of the reported technological capabilities are real, how do we ensure they serve a future of global cooperation and abundant, clean energy for all—instead of endless wars, poverty, artificial scarcity, and more than 80 years of secrecy surrounding one of the most transformative stories in human history?

With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang, Director for WantToKnow.info

Note: UFO Disclosure Explained: New Solutions for Humanity w/ Daniel Sheehan and Amber Yang is a visually impactful 23-minute educational video exploring the unprecedented UFO disclosure movement now underway to declassify reality and open the door to technologies and ideas that could transform how we address humanity’s greatest challenges. Throughout the conversation, we include carefully curated and visually impactful educational graphics, historical footage, news headlines, and scientific imagery.

Reports of Breakthrough Technologies

Excerpt from the WantToKnow.info UFO Information Center

1. The Anomalous Technologies at the Center of the Mystery
2. The Consciousness Connection
3. Did Some Modern Technologies Come From UFO/UAPs?
4. Beyond Artificial Scarcity: The Promise and Risks of Breakthrough Technologies

Defense contractors keep advanced technologies secret for commercial reasons. Militaries keep advanced technologies secret to stay ahead of foreign adversaries. If covert elements within the military-intelligence apparatus recovered UFOs and successfully reverse-engineered aspects of them, they could be in possession of technologies capable of fundamentally transforming energy, transportation, medicine, and more. The implications are so profound that it is unlikely such capabilities would be disclosed voluntarily. After all, breakthrough energy and scientific advancements have long been kept from the American public by our national security state and the fossil fuel industry, where major oil giants filed and then buried dozens of patents for cleaner technologies as early as the 1960s.

In this section, we explore the radical idea that the reported UFO/UAP craft are not isolated anomalies but a profound gateway to entirely new technological paradigms. We draw on accounts from renowned scientists and high-level military and intelligence officials with direct involvement in highly classified UFO/UAP secret programs and what has been described about the crafts themselves. Together, we explore what it could mean for how humanity addresses its most pressing challenges if even a fraction of these claims are true.

Let’s begin with the anomalous objects and technologies themselves and what military personnel, pilots, and officials have actually reported.

The Anomalous Technologies at the Center of the Mystery

Imagine a technology that can do 6-to-700 g-forces, that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour, that can evade radar and that can fly through air and water and possibly space … And oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth’s gravity. That’s precisely what we’re seeing¹ ... Our current fastest aircraft can go roughly 4,600 miles per hour. However, the UAP we are observing are traveling at 40,000 miles per hour and sometimes faster. At full speed, the SR-71, [one of the fastest aircraft ever built] known as a Blackbird, requires roughly half the state of Ohio to complete its turn. What we are seeing with UAP are vehicles that can make immediate right-angle turns, instantaneously accelerating and stopping on a dime at speeds up to ten times faster than the SR-71.²

— Luis Elizondo, former head of the secretive Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), excerpt from CBS News, "UFOs regularly spotted in restricted U.S. airspace"¹ and quote from the documentary Age of Disclosure²

• In the Journal of Scientific Exploration, researchers Thomas Beck, Ph.D. and Janet Colli, Ph.D. analyzed eyewitness testimony, congressional briefings, infrared videos recorded by US Navy aircraft and multi-sensor observations combining radar, visual, and infrared tracking. Some craft were observed holding perfectly stable positions in the air despite strong winds and turbulent conditions, then accelerating instantly from a standstill. They appear to move without any visible propulsion system or exhaust, often traveling at extreme speeds and accelerating rapidly without producing sonic booms or shockwaves. Anti-gravity effects are observed, where the Earth’s gravitational field no longer has an effect on the reported craft. Some have been reported to exhibit transmedium qualities, transitioning seamlessly between air and water with no splash or loss of speed. In multiple cases, they are seen surrounded by a luminous or plasma-like field, suggesting some form of interaction with the surrounding atmosphere. They propose that these craft may tap into the Earth’s natural electrical environment, creating intense electromagnetic fields that ionize the surrounding air into plasma. Think of plasma as air that has been energized so intensely that it becomes electrically charged and starts behaving differently from ordinary gas. Lightning, the Sun, and the Northern Lights are all examples of plasma. In this view, they would function less like fuel-powered vehicles and more like electrically driven systems connected to a continuous energy source.

• The descriptions of luminous or plasma-like fields reported echo claims by veteran defense and intelligence contractor physicists Dr. Hal Puthoff and Dr. Eric Davis that the luminous glow observed around some of the reported craft may represent a visible manifestation of the energetic field itself. In the documentary Age of Disclosure, they propose that the field creates a localized distortion of space and time, effectively separating the craft from the physical conditions of the external environment. Within that bubble, the craft is shielded from aerodynamic forces and Earth’s gravity, enabling maneuvers that appear impossible according to conventional physics. According to their hypothesis, the same field could also produce the luminous distortions and unusual sensor signatures frequently reported in military encounters. Understanding the source and mechanics of this energy field could have profound implications, including new forms of clean energy, revolutionary transportation systems, and the possibility of interstellar travel.

• In 2018, former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) Luis Elizondo reported that UFOs warp space-time. In a fascinating interview, Elizondo discusses a pilot who had a close encounter with a UFO that likely involved the warping of space time: “You know, Lue, it’s really bizarre. It felt like I was there for only five minutes, but when I looked at my watch 30 minutes went by, but I only used five minutes’ worth of fuel. How is that possible?” In one alleged crash-retrieval account reportedly shared with Senate Intelligence Committee staff, a whistleblower described a roughly 30-foot saucer partially embedded in the Earth whose interior was said to be the size of a football stadium.

• Retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, who served in the US Navy and as acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) put it best: “It’s not that they break the laws ... It’s that they demonstrate engineering capabilities we haven’t yet developed. We can’t build anything that can do that today.” Gallaudet once described a report from a Navy helicopter crew chief aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in 2021, who recorded a metallic sphere on infrared video flying just a few hundred feet above the ship. The object moved steadily before suddenly accelerating to extreme speeds and disappearing over the horizon. Gallaudet also asserted that sightings were so frequent that officers are “desensitized to the phenomena ... the Navy possesses a trove of video evidence and data regarding UAP.” In an interview with The Free Press, Gallaudet indicated that what the government has disclosed so far is “a fraction of the tip of the iceberg of what we’re really seeing day to day.”

• Congressman Tim Burchett has stated that US Navy admirals have reported encounters with unidentified submerged objects (USOs) as large as a football field moving at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour underwater. If accurate, such performance would far exceed the capabilities of any known human-made submarine, which are limited by drag, pressure, and propulsion constraints in water.

• In 2014, former US Navy F/A-18 fighter pilot Ryan Graves testified to Congress about routine encounters with unknown objects off the East Coast. He described one incident at the Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, where unknown objects in restricted airspace were being detected following radar system upgrades. During a training mission about 10 miles off the coast, two F-18 Super Hornets were separated by a UAP described as a dark cube encased within a clear sphere, estimated to be 5 to 15 feet in diameter, which passed within 50 feet of one aircraft. Over time, Graves stated that such encounters became so frequent that pilots began including UAP as a standard safety consideration in preflight briefings.

• Air Force veteran Dylan Borland testified that he encountered a large, triangular craft estimated to be around 100 feet across and one to two stories thick, exhibiting several anomalous technological features. He described the object as completely silent, with no visible propulsion system or exhaust, and said it appeared to “manifest” around a central light, forming a structured triangular shape. The craft’s material did not look rigid or metallic, but instead appeared fluid or dynamically changing in structure. As it moved across the base, Borland reported that it interfered with his electronics. This caused his phone to overheat and shut down, which suggested a strong electromagnetic effect. The object traveled smoothly and deliberately through the air without any detectable sound or aerodynamic disturbance.

Former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) Luis Elizondo holds up a photo of an alleged silver UFO/UAP taken in 2021 over the Four Corners region by a private pilot outside his aircraft. This nonpartisan briefing, hosted by UAP Disclosure Fund and sponsored by the bipartisan Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. *** EDIT: After posting this image, one of our readers found a news story suggesting the picture might be an optical illusion of aerial photography. If it is, this highlights the ongoing challenge of trying to make sense of a profound and complex subject while relying on questionable images provided by government-approved sources.

Astrophysicist Dr. Eric Davis has conducted classified work with the Defense Intelligence Agency, Pentagon programs, and the UAP Task Force, including the research of advanced nuclear and beamed-energy propulsion technology for the Air Force Research Lab. He recently briefed Congress in a nonpartisan briefing titled “Understanding UAP: Science, National Security & Innovation,” which was hosted by UAP Disclosure Fund and sponsored by the bipartisan Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. In this hearing, Dr. Davis stated that the observed performance of cases like the 2004 Nimitz “Tic Tac” implies an energy requirement on the order of hundreds of times the total annual electrical energy produced by the US. He has also said that recovered craft, as described to him by industry leadership, are “not of this Earth,” “not made by human hands,” and “not human.” When discussing so-called “exotic materials” from recovered craft, Davis explains that the materials consist of known elements from the periodic table yet their combinations, isotopic ratios, composition, and structural arrangement are highly unusual and engineered in ways that appear beyond current human technological capabilities.

Based on his experience in these programs, he also claimed that multiple governments, including the US, China, and Russia, have recovered craft from crashes or other incidents and placed them into extraordinarily secretive programs hidden from congressional oversight through mechanisms such as presidential emergency directives, shell companies, sole-source contracts, and internal contractor R&D pipelines. He says these programs have existed for decades under shifting code names, dating back at least to a craft recovered in Italy in 1933 and later obtained by the US, with many recoveries occurring in maritime environments. See our section, Government Cover-Ups: Controlling the UFO Narrative, for more on this.

What we are dealing with is certain electromagnetic devices that are powered by sources that we just don’t quite understand as of yet. Well, we are certainly not advertising them anyway. But these devices would generate free power. And free power would be something that corporations panic about and I think this government panics about. Looking at it from a governmental point of view: How are you going to tax free power? And from everyone that I have talked to who knows something about this subject matter, they do believe that the sources of energy that keep these vehicles in propulsion are sources of energy that are just as free as free could be. They don’t cause any harm to the environment. They don’t cause any footprints to be left anywhere.

— Brigadier General Stephen Lovekin was a former member of US Army Signal Corps and a close confidant to President Eisenhower with an above top secret clearance. Read his full testimony in The Disclosure Project.

The Consciousness Connection

At one point during the “Understanding UAP: Science, National Security & Innovation“ hearing, Dr. Davis and former Department of Defense and NASA aerospace engineer and physicist Travis Taylor noted how many of the reported UFO/UAP craft do not contain any power devices or systems inside the craft. Scientific analyses of craft encountered by military, commercial, and civilian aircraft also indicate that the crafts do not have flight or control surfaces, or any conventional steering or interface system. Dr. Davis and Taylor speculated that energy might somehow be transmitted to the craft remotely, allowing it to operate without carrying obvious propellant or an identifiable engine.

If these craft truly lack conventional controls or interfaces, it opens the door to a more radical possibility: that the key to interacting with such technology may lie not in hardware, but in human consciousness itself.

According to whistleblowers, consciousness is reportedly viewed as a key component of interaction with the phenomenon. One such individual is Air Force veteran Jake Barber.

Jake Barber was an aerospace mechanic, precision shooter, and contractor in classified defense and intelligence programs. He’s one of the latest whistleblowers to come forward alleging direct involvement in specialized retrieval missions in highly classified programs, including transporting or recovering anomalous craft. In January 2025, he provided Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) testimony in a secure compartmented information facility (SCIF) to members of Congress and congressional staff.

In an interview with senior special investigations NewsNation correspondent Ross Coulthart, Barber describes a retrieval mission involving what his team called an “8GONE,” or octagonal-shaped disc. As he approached the craft, he began experiencing an intense emotional connection, describing a loving, maternal presence accompanied by profound feelings of sadness, grief, and compassion. The experience transformed his life and led him to view the phenomenon as not purely mechanical, but as something that may possess an intelligence capable of interacting directly and telepathically with human consciousness.

As his involvement in these programs continued, Barber discovered that the consciousness component of the phenomenon was well known and taken seriously within the elite military circles he worked in. Senior special investigations NewsNation correspondent Ross Coulthart spoke with Barber and decorated Special Forces Operator Don Paul Bales, who alleged the existence of a “psionics” program involving “psionic operators” or psychics—identified for their ability to use focused intention, meditation, or what he describes as a kind of telepathic awareness—to interact with these craft. Barber asserted that these individuals are involved in efforts to “invite” or attract UAP to specific locations, occasionally working in conjunction with specialized technologies designed to signal or draw them in.

The ability to go into something like a meditative state and summon UAP and pilot UAP... that is real. That’s 100% real.

— Air Force veteran and whistleblower Jake Barber in aninterviewwith Ross Coulthart, an award-winning former 60 Minutes Australia journalist and senior special investigations correspondent for NewsNation (Read more about the US government’s psychic research programs here)

Drawing on his extraordinary experiences in these classified programs, Barber went on to establish Skywatcher, an aerospace intelligence organization comprised of former special operators, military aviators, intelligence officers, and national security professionals investigating UAPs. Rather than treating the phenomenon as a collection of isolated anecdotes, they have organized UAP sightings into what they describe as a living “taxonomy” or classification system. This includes different shapes (e.g., spheres, tic-tacs, triangles, orbs), different behaviors (hovering, rapid acceleration, transmedium movement), and different contexts (military ranges, oceans, high altitude, etc.).

The consciousness connection, and reports of advanced technologies, corroborates the testimony of Colonel Philip J. Corso, former head of the Foreign Technology Desk in the US Army and a member of President Eisenhower‘s National Security Council from 1953–1957. A year before his death, he came forward to share his astounding knowledge and involvement in covert government operations regarding UFO phenomena in his book Day After Roswell, where he describes how he was in charge of developing advanced war technologies from the artifacts recovered from the 1947 Roswell crash in 1961.

According to his testimony, Col. Corso described the “crescent-shaped space vehicle” recovered from the Roswell crash as having no traditional navigational controls, control sticks, wheels, throttles, pedals, cables, flaps, or rudders. He later uncovered reports from engineers at Norton Air Force Base in California describing craft that could be controlled directly through a pilot’s mind using brain signals rather than physical controls with an interface translating those signals into movement.

Did Some Modern Technologies Come From UFO/UAPs?

Corso also describes how he spearheaded the Army’s reverse-engineering project that led to today’s integrated circuits, fiber optics, lasers, bulletproof vests, and more. Secretly, they would “seed” ET technology to American industry giants, mixing human technology with ET technology, without telling those companies where it came from. Read our full summary of his book, Day After Roswell.

To attempt to exploit the technology ... it had to do so separately and independently from any normal weapons-development program. The descriptions of the super secret projects at Nellis Air Force Base or Area 51 in the Nevada desert seem to fit the profile ... especially the employment of the “skunk works” group at Lockheed in the development of the Stealth fighter and B2 bomber. In 1961 ... the top-secret file of Roswell information came into my possession when I took over the Foreign Technology desk at R&D [Research and Development]. My boss, General Trudeau, asked me to use the army’s ongoing weapons development and research program as a way to filter the Roswell technology into the mainstream of industrial development through the military defense contracting program. Today, items such as lasers, integrated circuitry, fiber-optics networks, accelerated particle-beam devices, and even the Kevlar material in bulletproof vests are all commonplace. Yet the seeds for the development of all of them were found in the crash of the alien craft at Roswell.

— Col. Corso, excerpt from Day After Roswell (for more, explore: WantToKnow.info Full Summary of Day After Roswell, Roswell Crash Cover-Up)

Don Phillips, a retired Air Force pilot and special aircraft engineer, came forward to discuss his personal experience with UFOs as a pilot, along with his experiences as a contractor for Lockheed Martin’s secret weapons and technology unit, Skunkworks, which was kept secret until 2014. He worked on secret projects for the CIA and other government agencies as part of an “unseen” and “hidden” industry. In his testimony for The Disclosure Project, Phillips described reverse engineering programs and certain technologies that have been developed because of ETs: computer chips, lasers, night vision, and bulletproof vests. His testimony starts on pg. 281 of the Disclosure Project briefing. (Note: The Disclosure Project is a nonprofit research organization advocating for the disclosure of alleged classified UFO information. Since 1993, it has documented fascinating testimonies from top scientists and military-intelligence officers who reveal their knowledge of advanced technologies).

When I was working with the Skunkworks, we signed an agreement with the National Security Agency and the National Security Council, as well as the CIA. And we kept very quiet about this. Anti-gravitational research was going. ... We know that there were some captured craft from 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico. And, yeah, they were real. And, yes, we really did get some technology from them. And, yes, we really did put it to work. ... There was no question that there are peoples, or beings, from outside the planet. Are these ET people hostile? Well, if they were hostile, with their weaponry they could have destroyed us a long time ago. ... We got these things that are handheld scanners that scan the body and determine what the condition is. We can also treat from the same scanner. Are these things real? Well, I can tell you personally that we’ve been working on them. And we have ones that can cure cancer. Yes, diagnose and cure. People whose financial interests could be damaged by the release of certain technologies keep these out of view. ... One of the purposes for founding this technology corporation that I did in 1998 was to bring forth these technologies that can help get rid of the toxins – that can clean the air, that help get rid of the need for so much fossil fuel. Yes, it is time.

— Lockheed Martin Skunkworks contractor and former US Air Force pilot Don Phillips (watch full video testimony or read full transcript)

Beyond Artificial Scarcity: The Promise and Risks of Breakthrough Technologies

The reported non-human technologies and their characteristics are remarkable enough. The implications of how these craft operate are even more profound. If even a fraction of the reported observations are accurate, we may be confronting technologies that challenge one of the most fundamental assumptions of our age: that scarcity is inevitable. The idea that energy could be abundant, clean, and universally accessible is more than an engineering revolution. It is a consciousness shift.

Clean and unlimited energy sources could radically shift our thinking about the climate change crisis and our larger future. Desalination could be scaled up to address the water scarcity crisis. Fears about energy-guzzling tech like AI and blockchain would be alleviated. Transportation could be clean. Medicine could be revolutionized.

Yet instead of these technologies being used to radically reduce fossil fuel dependence and regenerate our planet, these advancements are being secretly repurposed to serve the war economy. In fact, private military contractors profiting from conflict and global instability control many of these non-human technologies that could transform our world for the better. Under AATIP, it was claimed by Luis Elizondo and program contractors that materials recovered from UFOs may have “otherworldly origins and useful applications for the military.”

This is technology that could replace oil, gas and coal and protect our planet for future generations. How can we use these technologies and all the capabilities that come from it, not to fight a war, but to increase our standard of living. [These] same technologies … could [become] some very, very powerful weapons of mass destruction. You could put a nuclear bomb inside one of these things and let it fly right through a building, through concrete, through steel, wherever you want it, anywhere in the world.

—Age of Disclosure, a 2025 documentary featuring interviews with 34 high-ranking members of the US government, military and intelligence communities with direct knowledge of UFO/UAP phenomena

Some of these reported exotic, non-human technologies are not without risk. There have been reports of burns, radiation damage, and other injuries from contact with the phenomenon. Physicist Dr. Hal Puthoff, the creator of the CIA’s own psychic spy program and consultant to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) said in the documentary Age of Disclosure: “The energy field associated with these craft causes a highly energetic wave of radiation, which is why people getting too close to a UAP can experience biological effects that are harmful.” Any attempt to engineer this class of technologies for ourselves must be taken carefully. Yet the need for caution is not, in itself, a sufficient reason to avoid advancing a technology that could dramatically improve life on Earth and beyond.

Many of today’s biggest problems aren’t accidental. They emerged from the structure of the system itself, manipulated endlessly by powerful economic, political, and corporate interests that depend on control, secrecy, and the illusion of scarcity to maintain authority. Yet what happens to that authority if it depends on controlling a limited resource that suddenly becomes clean, unlimited, and abundant?

We are witnessing the deliberate suppression of a whole new class of breakthrough technologies, both human and non-human, that defy conventional physics and appear to run on energy sources that don’t burn anything, don’t emit pollution, and could fundamentally change how we power our world. This calls into question the whole idea of climate doom and the fear-based apocalyptic stories we’re inundated with.

We believe it’s important to notice these attractors and turning points in human consciousness and use them for good. How do we steward this transition? How do we ensure that breakthrough technologies serve life rather than control? And how do we translate these possibilities into shared abundance and wealth on a global level?

Still to this day, government narratives claim that no secret ET programs have existed. In our 33-min Speculation Station video, we look at everything from specific UFO technologies that have allegedly been recovered from crashes to how these other-worldly technologies might have helped accelerate the development of some human technologies.

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today’s headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who’s elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power. We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

At WantToKnow.info, we’ve been grappling with the forces of censorship since the beginning.

In the years after 9/11, we began collecting the best news reports we could find on both high level cover-ups and inspiring topics. Our focus was always on the most reliable and verifiable sources, like leading newspapers and scientific journals. Oftentimes, we found that the most revealing stories would disappear from the web shortly after publication. Today, there are hundreds and maybe thousands of news reports in our public archive that no longer exist anywhere else on the internet.

We have this information, but people who don’t know about us already increasingly have no way to find and access this information. Since 2020, online censorship and propaganda have become all pervasive. This has hit us hard. Our entire model challenges the official story by questioning dominant narratives with reliable and verifiable sources. We are exactly the kind of organization being suppressed by the new censorship-industrial complex.

Google no longer includes us in search results on the specialized topics we cover. Our social media posts don’t get shown to many people. Getting the word out has never been more difficult. And as more and more people move away from Google searches in favor of AI queries, the censorship and propaganda is becoming even more sophisticated.

Layers of AI censorship

The findings highlight growing concerns about attempts by governments, corporations and philanthropies to influence widely used online information sources that increasingly feed search engines and artificial intelligence systems that summarize information for the public. - US Right to Know

Mainstream Large Language Model (LLM) AI chat apps are all built to subtly censor dissenting views and promote the official story. This censorship happens on multiple levels:

• Google is no longer indexing the vast majority of online content, making AI searches the only available way to look for certain kinds of information.

• The selection of AI training data excludes information that challenges the official story

• The training data itself is influenced by intelligence agencies and corporate interests. AIs rely heavily on data from sites like Wikipedia and Reddit, but these sites themselves are manipulated by the CIA and shadowy intelligence consortiums like the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL)

• Criminals like Jeffrey Epstein hire specialists to manipulate the web in their favor

• The AI model’s “alignment” or personality is designed to refuse to respond to some classes of controversial questions

• Additional “safety features” are added by platforms, further restricting the scope of acceptable chat

The censorship of AI is part of a much broader effort to control public discourse. Here’s a graphic uncovered by investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger from a CTIL briefing that documents some of the strategies employed to do this. These strategies include redirecting searches, causing reputational harm to dissident voices, hijacking content, and co-opting influencers.

Seeds of Truth

As part of our response to the challenges of this new media environment, PEERS started a project called Seeds of Truth in 2025. Our original intention was to create an uncensored AI that could respond intelligently to questions about the controversial topics we cover. Last August, with funding from a politically unaffiliated public benefit foundation, a small team of us began working on the AI. We approached the issue of LLM censorship systematically and produced some promising tech. Here’s a description of the endeavor:

Major events have shown us time and time again that we’re not getting the full truth from the official story. Seeds of Truth (SoT) is a censorship-resistant AI built for conscious, self-directed learning in a media landscape shaped by special interests, manipulative algorithms, and institutional guardrails.

SoT is trained on millions of suppressed, overlooked, and hard-to-find documents with sources always provided. It offers a trustworthy space for disillusioned people across the political spectrum — researchers, journalists, independent thinkers, and everyday truth-seekers — to develop their own worldview, one capable of holding complexity, nuance, and multiple truths at once to make sense of this dynamic moment in human history.

Everywhere you look, media narratives and even progressive, alternative social movements are saturated with doom and gloom, divisive, and problem-focused perspectives. SoT helps people explore what’s possible beyond fear with the best research and real-world examples of game-changing solutions, breakthrough ideas, emerging alternatives, and stories of healing and societal transformation.

We’re here to inspire the transformation and healing of our world by offering the kind of information that empowers this shift.

So far, our team has put about 1,179 hours into this work. We’ve turned ideas into designs and developed infrastructure to bring those designs to life. Our humble crew has exchanged 4,662 Telegram messages, trained 9 models, checked over 110,000 lines of code into our Github repositories (peersai and seedsoftruth), built multiple testing environments, prototyped uncensorable decentralized datasets, and developed a test chat app. This app uses a custom-trained 70 billion parameter LLM base model in combination with a 166,000 item dataset to produce some pretty good responses, on par with the responses produced by other uncensored AI projects.

The technical objects we’ve produced include a web crawler and data processing notebooks, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters, and specialized indexed datasets. These are valuable public goods. But the things we’ve learned about the technology are even more valuable. Right away, we’re incorporating AI into a new WantToKnow research portal. And we’re in a great position to make other significant contributions to the larger effort to make uncensored media and controversial research more accessible.

As people change how they find and make sense of information, AI is taking center stage. Powerful forces are using AI for new forms of censorship and propaganda, but this technology also has great potential to make us more free and informed. Seeds of Truth is a good step in that direction. In upcoming posts, we’ll share more about the project, the AI, the dataset, and what you can do to make use of the the resources we’re creating.

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today’s headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who’s elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power. We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

UFO disclosure may be the wild card we need to spark a deeper shift in consciousness, helping us recognize our place in a profoundly interconnected universe and opening the door to technologies and ideas that could transform how we address humanity’s greatest challenges. Together, Harvard-trained civil rights lawyer Daniel Sheehan and I explore the rapidly evolving UFO disclosure movement and the NEW POLITICAL EFFORTS underway to compel our government to release what they know about UFO/UAPs, non-human intelligence, and the breakthrough technologies potentially associated with them.

Throughout the conversation, we include carefully curated and visually impactful educational graphics, historical footage, news headlines, and scientific imagery to help people better understand the history, evidence, and emerging political process around UFO disclosure.

Watch our latest 23-minute video, UFO Disclosure Explained:
New Solutions for Humanity w/ Daniel Sheehan and Amber Yang

OUR CONVERSATION EXPLORES SEVERAL KEY DIMENSIONS OF UFO DISCLOSURE:

• VOICES from within the disclosure movement including high-level military insiders and whistleblowers

• the possibility that reported UFO/UAP craft operate using breakthrough energy systems that EMIT NO POLLUTION and defy conventional understanding of physics, which could open NEW POSSIBILITIES for solving humanity’s energy, water, transportation, and environmental challenges

• how HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS itself may be the key to unlocking these breakthrough technologies

• the rapidly evolving POLITICAL PROCESS now unfolding—not only to release long-held information, but also to help democratic institutions PREPARE for the broader implications of disclosure

• the REAL CONCERNS many people have about disclosure, including the possibility that information released through official channels could be MANIPULATED, CAREFULLY MANAGED, or part of a LARGER PSY-OP.

• the deeper cultural and human dimensions of disclosure, showing that this issue is not only political, but also invites PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION, GLOBAL UNITY, open dialogue, and a broader exploration of humanity’s place in the cosmos. Rather than asking people to adopt any fixed conclusions, we invite people from all perspectives to explore the evidence, ask thoughtful questions, and stay open to discovery.

A Turning Point for Humanity

Many of today’s biggest problems aren’t accidental. They emerged from the structure of the system itself, manipulated endlessly by powerful economic, political, and corporate interests that depend on control, secrecy, and the illusion of scarcity to maintain authority.

Yet what happens to that authority if it depends on controlling a limited resource that suddenly becomes clean, unlimited, and abundant?

Breakthrough energy and scientific advancements have long been kept from the American public by our national security state. Some of these could radically reduce fossil fuel dependence and regenerate our planet. Yet instead of improving our lives, these advancements are being secretly repurposed to serve the war economy. Private military contractors profiting from conflict and global instability control many of the technologies that could transform our world for the better. Energy could be free and abundant. Transportation could be clean. Medicine could be revolutionized.

We are witnessing the deliberate suppression of a whole new class of breakthrough technologies, both human and non-human, that defy conventional physics and appear to run on energy sources that don’t burn anything, don’t emit pollution, and could fundamentally change how we power our world. Maybe we might even call into question the whole idea of climate doom and the fear-based apocalyptic stories we’re inundated with.

We believe it’s important to notice these attractors and turning points in human consciousness and use them for good. How do we steward this transition? How do we ensure that breakthrough technologies serve life rather than control? And how do we translate these possibilities into shared abundance and wealth on a global level?

The UFO/UAP issue is the thread that connects the manufactured scarcity behind war and human suffering, environmental destruction, unaccountable elites and corporations wielding enormous power, and a society fractured by polarization, loneliness, and loss of meaning.

Who are we? Why are we here? What are we truly capable of?

With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info

MORE RESOURCES:

WantToKnow.info UFO Information Center
WantToKnow.info UFO News Database
All WantToKnow.info videos on UFO/UAP phenomena

Check out our other 26-min educational video below, UFO DISCLOSURE: BREAKTHROUGH TECHNOLOGY AND AWAKENING HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, where I interview leading experts along with clips and powerful stories from whistleblowers, military officers, intelligence insiders, and legal voices bringing hidden truths to light. We also investigate how for decades, government agencies and corporations have secretly studied and weaponized breakthroughs in human consciousness while keeping their transformative potential from the public. This story is not just about advanced technology, it’s about awakening to a deeper story of what it means be human.

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today’s headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who’s elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power. We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

Above: 10-min video of me and Joe Martino from Collective Evolution breaking down the latest Epstein files to provide deeper sensemaking and clarity on humanity's darkest lessons.

In this brief Substack investigation, we explore a disturbing diary released in the latest Epstein files of a 16-year-old girl with autism who describes being trafficked and exploited over an extended period of time, including being made into a “human incubator” for Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

As this investigation reveals, the diary’s claims fit neatly into the larger picture now emerging from the newly-public information.

There’s now extensive documentation of Epstein’s deep ties to the scientific elite and their active exploration into eugenics, designer babies, human cloning, social engineering, and other ethically questionable human experimentation practices. We also present verifiable information that places his Zorro Ranch property in New Mexico at the center of these activities—including a comprehensive overview of the property’s strangest features and its striking proximity to some of the most secretive research institutions in the United States.

Before diving in, we recommend opening to any inner guidance you might have in asking for discernment, open-mindedness, and courage as you read this material. As the human family comes to terms with the darkness that exists on this planet, the scale of the forces involved can make us feel powerless and afraid. Yet collective transformation and healing become possible when what long existed in the shadows is brought into conscious awareness.

‘I am Nothing But Your Human Incubator’

Based on information contained in emails from the girl’s attorney, she was 16 years old at the time the diary was written. The lawyer also describes the victim’s background. Her adopted mother, biological mother, and paternal grandfather forced her to perform sexual acts with adult men since she was very young—eventually she was trafficked to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The attorney also provides context and verbatim transcripts from a separate “trauma journal” written in 2012 while she was undergoing inpatient trauma care treatment. The journal documents episodes of acute psychological and physiological distress, persistent fear of being abducted, chronic hypervigilance, and repeated belief that Epstein or Maxwell could appear at any moment.

At first glance, the coded diary combines magazine cutouts with handwritten, coded entries, consisting of letter pairs which must be read top to bottom (EFTA02731433, EFTA02731341). When reviewing sections of the decoded version, the diary describes a life of constant controlled movement—between homes, flights, and powerful adults—where she writes of repeated rape and abuse. The author names a series of prominent figures, including Prince Andrew, former US Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers, NFL figures Dan Snyder and Joe Gibbs, and former US senator George Mitchell. In other entries, she writes of her confusion that “people you expect to be good… even old senators like George Mitchell who you think would be good like a grandpa are bad” and “Even the old president! They will get you. He should have been thinking of Chelsea! Gross!” (EFTA00155037)

The diary also includes a disturbing poem about Leon Black, finance billionaire and founder of one of the world’s largest private equity firms. The girl describes being bitten, thrown to the floor, left bleeding, and blamed for “ruining” a trip. These claims match the 2023 lawsuit against Black, in which Black was accused of brutally raping a 16-year-old with autism and a rare form of Down syndrome often associated with milder intellectual disability and higher cognitive functioning. Black eventually paid $62.5 million to “be released from any potential claims” arising out of the investigations of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.

The most unsettling part of the diary is where she describes multiple pregnancies in which her newborns were taken away minutes after birth. Epstein told her she came from a “superior gene pool,” citing her hair and eye color and musical ability:

There is no respect for me as a human.
I am nothing but your property and incubator!
You only trust me when I am under your complete control.

In the hall Ghislaine said she was beautiful.
SHE WAS.
Not is.
She was a beautiful girl.
I heard her!
Where is she?
Why did she stop whimpering?
She was born!
I heard the tiny cries!
I cant do this anymore!

Controlled ALL by Jeffrey!
All the time!
And go to New Mexico? What in the hell?
This makes no sense. What about school?

Superior gene pool ?!?
Why me?
It makes no sense. Why my hair color and eye color?
That feels very Nazi like but I’m think[ing] about these stupid insane theories he has I guess in his mind it makes sense.
The piano and music comments are made to convince me this is right and will create perfect offspring he calls them.
I dont think it works that way and its making me hate playing altogether piano or viola.
I am starting to resent them both.
I miss the person I was before I was made into what feels as a human incubator.

I still always dream to build a better world.
She went from being a beautiful young girl to a sad broken child...
but maybe a hope that after it all, I still truly had it within herself.
One day I aspire to be like this:
she came in like a lamb and went out like a lioness.

The alleged victim’s diary quoted above is not the first allegation of medical abuse and trauma taking place as part of Epstein’s operations. After all, it’s been widely reported that Epstein confided in award-winning scientists about his goal to “have 20 women at a time impregnated“ at Zorro Ranch to “seed the human race with his DNA.”

Juliette Bryant, who was compensated as part of both the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program and a separate settlement with JP Morgan Chase, described waking up naked and paralyzed in a laboratory setting at his New Mexico property and seeing people in hazmat suits.

Unlike my time on Epstein’s island, of which I still have acute memories, I can’t even remember the room I slept in at Zorro Ranch. Epstein monitored my every move … He told me he was a CIA agent, that my family was on a list and that he could set me up to be arrested or eliminated. I believed him. I had no choice. No one dared disobey him. He’s a master manipulator. I always felt like he was watching me through my phone or computer. It messed with my head very badly.
— Juliette Bryant

While trauma on its own can impact memory, there are signs that Bryant’s memory issues at Zorro Ranch were a result of being drugged. In an interview with The Daily Mail New Mexico State Representative Andrea Romero stated on the recent announcement of a “Truth Commission” to investigate sexual and medical crimes at Zorro Ranch:

We have people coming forward saying they were drugged, had sex organs and sperm harvested from their bodies, and woke up around medical equipment not knowing where they were or what happened to them.

Juliette Byrant at Zorro Ranch | Courtesy of Juliette Bryant

Speculation time: If Epstein and his accomplices were drugging victims, what drugs were they using? In one of Epstein’s emails, he asked his house manager Ann Rodriguez: “ask chris about my trumpet plants at nursery.” A year later, Epstein received an email from supermodel photographer Antoine Verglas with a Daily Mail article titled “The most dangerous drug in the world: ‘Devil’s Breath’ chemical from Colombia can block free will, wipe memory and even kill.” Verglas wrote: “have a look at the article and especially video at the end.” The article explains that “Devil’s Breath” refers to scopolamine, a psychoactive drug derived from plants such as Brugmansia, commonly known as Angel’s Trumpet. According to a drug dealer in Bogota, Colombia, “You can guide them wherever you want … It’s like they’re a child.” After the drug wears off, victims often have total amnesia and no recollection as to what happened. The VICE News video Verglas told Epstein to watch documents the horrors of people who were drugged with this substance. Scopolamine was historically used by the CIA and Nazi Germany—could it be that Epstein was using it for his operations? And was he alerted to the news story because it made his secret mind control drug less of a secret?

The limited information we have from the latest Epstein files release suggest the convicted sex trafficker was up to a whole litany of medical and scientific explorations:

• Recent Epstein emails reveal correspondence with transhumanist and crypto investor Bryan Bishop discussing funding that could move a project beyond “garage biology” toward a first “live birth” and “possibly a human clone,” while explicitly agreeing that the identities of any children and benefactors would need to remain hidden to avoid public scrutiny. Another email exchange between Epstein and Bishop explores where and how human gene-editing projects could proceed with minimal legal oversight while discussing technologies that would enable “unlimited” manipulation of human embryos and therefore “unlock commercial opportunities.”

• Investigations by Drop Site News reveal how Epstein recruited NSA and DARPA-level codebreakers to “hack” the human genome. In other words, Epstein wanted people who normally crack enemy spy codes to decode and potentially manipulate how the human body works. The New York Times also reported Epstein’s connections to George M. Church, a molecular engineer researching how specific genes might be altered to create superhumans. Epstein also worked with scientists to prove his hypothesis that blue eyes were an indicator of high intelligence while he was funding and visiting Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.

• In a transcripted conversation between Epstein and two people named Richard and Jessica, Epstein makes a series of disturbing statements. This included describing people “beyond their reproductive stage” as having little value. Ethical concerns about killing a cloned being with a conscience could be avoided by creating it “without a head.” And suicide bombers having evolutionary value, as an individual’s death can be advantageous to the group.

• A 2020 investigative email discusses a woman who has stated on record that Epstein offered her money to “birth babies for black market use.” The email includes a news article describing an activist who later died by suicide after alleging that the religious cult leader John of God—subsequently arrested on rape and sexual-abuse charges—ran a system in which girls were enslaved, forced to give birth, and their babies sold before the girls were allegedly killed.

• Email correspondence shows Nicholas Christakis, a leading Harvard sociologist, directly engaging Epstein on research explicitly aimed at manipulating social networks to produce “population-level behavior change.” Christakis describes work on targeting influential individuals, engineering cooperation, creating artificial tipping points, and embedding bots among humans to steer group behavior. Looking at the files, it appears that these experiments were not theories but actively funded experiments. This research presents a dual-use risk: methods designed for public health or cooperation can just as easily be repurposed for mass persuasion, social control, or political manipulation especially in the hands of an unaccountable billionaire with intelligence ties.

• The term “egg baby” shows up in two documents. In one email, Epstein proposes financial arrangements with a redacted individual, including the question: “is there a prohibition on you marrying our egg baby twenty years from now and transferring your assets … keeping in mind that if one day you will return to govt, this all has to be perfect.” This strongly suggests the recipient was either a current or former government official. The other exchange is between Epstein and Kathy Ruemmler, Goldman Sachs lawyer and former White House counsel under Obama, where she writes to him: “Viv (my egg baby) is so smart and fun.” Ruemmler acted as a key legal adviser to Epstein, which included killing an ABC News Interview with survivor Virginia Giuffre. In fact, Epstein’s text messages show that he considered Ruemmler as his “great defender.” What is an “egg baby”? A child created through artificial reproduction methods or a codeword for something else?

• A search for “Gino Yu” on the Justice Department’s “Epstein Library” portal yields over 1,000 results. Epstein was introduced to the Hong Kong academic around 2010 through AI researcher Ben Goertzel, who worked with Yu at PolyU on OpenCog, an open-source AI project funded by Epstein that sought to build machines that think more like humans (aka “emotional robots“). Over the years, Yu and Epstein worked together to identify scientists and people with special abilities such as mind reading, intuition, and more. Yu had apparent connections to the former head of China’s “psi-op program” for people with special abilities, an accomplished energy healer and longevity researcher with ties to USSR military and government programs, and women with psychic abilities (EFTA00819732, EFTA02624641, EFTA01053550, EFTA00907010). Epstein was also in close contact with spiritual guru Deepak Chopra and other scientists studying telepathy and other psychic phenomena.

Epstein’s connections with some of the world’s top scientists did not emerge spontaneously. They were the result of a carefully crafted public persona built over decades. By 1980, he had made it into the Cosmopolitan issue as “Bachelor of the Month.” By 2002, news stories described him as a “modern maharaja“ and an “international moneyman of mystery“ who managed money for the Rockefellers and other billionaires. He was deeply embedded in institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, advising billionaires, flying presidents, and funding Nobel-level scientists—despite having no clear academic credentials.

In 1995, David Rockefeller, former head of Chase Bank and a historic player in US global financial and political power, welcomed Epstein to the board of Rockefeller University. Epstein’s established ties to the Rockefeller family at this time could help us understand the vast influence came to have later, and the connection may have encouraged his obsession with eugenics.

Many associate eugenics with Hitler and Nazi Germany, yet the concept of a genetically superior race was born in the US decades before Hitler came to power. In fact, the Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, the program that Nazi doctor Josef Mengele (aka “Angel of Death“) worked in before he went to Auschwitz. Josef Mengele’s US-funded eugenics research laid the foundation for his experimentation on human subjects before and during World War II.

Some even believe we [Rockefellers] are part of a secret cabal, working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists,’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.
― David Rockefeller in his memoir, Memoirs

The Zorro Ranch Connection

Zorro Ranch spans 8,000+ acres in the unincorporated community of Stanley, New Mexico. It visibly features a private airstrip, helicopter pad, a 33,000+ sq ft mansion, guest houses, a firehouse, and other recreational spaces. In 1993, Epstein purchased the nearly 8,000-acre ranch from former New Mexico governor Bruce King, whose family still owns land surrounding the property. Epstein later became a major campaign donor to King’s son, Gary King, who served as New Mexico Attorney General from 2007 to 2015 and launched the state’s Human Trafficking Task Force.

The ranch is the only property owned by Epstein that was never searched by law enforcement despite major calls for investigation, even as his New York, Florida, and US Virgin Island properties were raided. And then, after Epstein’s 2008 conviction, New Mexico did not require him to register as a sex offender even as Florida, New York, and the Virgin Islands made him register. Instead, Epstein was allowed to move freely in New Mexico.

His purchase of the property was influenced by its close proximity to top physicists who had worked at Los Alamos, according to an unreleased interview he recorded with Goldman Sachs banker, former chief White House strategist, and filmmaker Steve Bannon. In the interview, he clearly showed an interest in advancing scientific understanding around quantum mechanics, chaos theory, consciousness, and other unexplainable phenomena that challenged conventional understanding of physics—which all could one day be monetized through predictive models for markets and human behavior.

Epstein’s wide-ranging scientific ambitions could have been accommodated in secret at Zorro Ranch.

• Days after Epstein was arrested on July 9, 2019, an FBI crisis intake report dated July 19, 2019 records a warning from a retired New Mexico state police officer. He lived nearby, stating that there were “a lot of high profile people seen frequenting the property.” He described a newly constructed barn that he believed was inconsistent with normal agricultural use, noting the presence of a chimney that could be used to destroy evidence. He also reported that the barn had a garage-style door appearing to be a sally port: an enclosed, controlled-access entry often used in prisons, military bases, or secure facilities to allow vehicles or people to enter without being visible from outside.

• Eddy Aragon, who owns Albuquerque radio station Rock of Talk on KIVA, obtained Zorro Ranch’s architecture plans for the 33,000 sq ft main residence, describing a maze of rooms, vestibules, waiting areas and doors. He also spoke to Zorro Ranch’s architect and a former IT contractor, who worked on Epstein’s internet communications and security from 1999 to 2007. They described a massive underground space barred to staff and fitted with cameras. The IT contractor described framed photographs of underage topless girls displayed alongside famous and powerful men, as well as rooms “where everything, from the embroidered pillows, couches, statues and sculptures were nude women, couples having sex or fertility statues.”

• Security consultant Jared Kellogg was brought in by long-time ranch manager Brice Gordon to design a surveillance system. Kellogg said he was barred from entering certain buildings and underground areas, allowed only a brief glimpse into a basement corridor. He stated: “What is odd is that as a security professional, for me to give the best protection I can give a customer, I need the full layout of the land. I need to see the nooks and crannies, all the blind spots. They were limiting that access.” He also said Gordon repeatedly boasted about high-profile guests including the Clintons who stayed in the Western-themed “cowboy village” on the property.

• Maria Farmer, a survivor who provided the first formal criminal complaint against Epstein to law enforcement, was told by Epstein that Zorro Ranch and all his other residences had tunnel systems and mechanical rooms that were “bigger than houses.” In an interview with Artnet News, Farmer shared the strange stunts, pranks, and activities Epstein and Maxwell would do with her and other art students at the ranch. For more on Farmer, explore her disturbing art collection depicting abuse at the hands of high-profile people (you can also view all her paintings in an email thread released by the DOJ).

Following a redacted 2019 email to Aragon (mentioned above) alleging that two “foreign girls” were strangled from “rough, fetish sex” and buried in the hills near Zorro Ranch, New Mexico Land Commissioner recently demanded a criminal investigation into these claims. The email also contained video files of a suicide confession and under-age rape and threesome videos with Epstein.

Will the remains of these girls be found with further investigation? Technologies like ground penetrating radar exist now. Buried evidence could be unearthed. In a 2011 email, Epstein ordered one of Epstein’s construction managers Gary Kerney to “bury everything” before his arrival on the island. What will investigators find if they excavate?

Zorro Ranch lies within a dense scientific corridor connecting Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia, White Sands, and the Santa Fe Institute—a region central to some of the most secretive US weapons research programs. This was the birthplace of the atomic bomb, a hub for some of the most advanced weapons research on the planet, and a hotspot for UFO/UAP phenomena near nuclear facilities. New Mexico was also one of the main places where Nazi war criminals were brought over under Operation Paperclip after World War II. Over 60 years ago, Los Alamos scientists developed and patented technology that could melt rock to create self-sealing underground tunnels through hard igneous rock and even sand. The patent explicitly states that the rock-melting tunneling system was intended to operate at depths of up to roughly 30 kilometers (~18.6 miles), citing the unusually shallow Mohorovičić discontinuity (the boundary between Earth’s crust and mantle) as “well within reach” of the proposed design.

Integrating the Darkness

“Who benefits from ignoring how Jeffrey Epstein long managed to operate in New Mexico, nestled among so many government secrets, covert operations, religious enclaves, and futurist laboratories? Maybe the honeybees provide a clue. Honey bees are social insects that organize to perform complex critical tasks that keep the colony alive. Maybe, like them, we live in a compartmented world where the rot of one cell can remain ignored by the other cells around it. Perhaps our hive mind compels us to look the other way, to avoid too many questions, to not think about how many other cells contain secret worlds of wealth, deceit and violence. To really look inside them all might accelerate the collapse of the entire colony.
—”Jeffrey Epstein Chose New Mexico for a Reason,” The New Republic

Despite how much has already been exposed in the latest Epstein files, what we’re seeing is far from the whole picture. The document release likely contains misinformation and has been manipulated to create a specific public perception of the situation that’s incomplete, sensationalized, or misleading. At best, we’re peeping through a keyhole to get a look into a vast and cluttered room that few are truly familiar with. How can we set aside our confirmation bias in favor of mindful inquiry?

There’s still a great deal that we simply don’t know. Yet given what we DO know, we can start asking the kinds of powerful questions that can bring us all together in service to truth:

Who decided that New Mexico was the one place Epstein could move freely after his 2008 conviction and why?

Was Zorro Ranch connected to black budget intelligence agency operations?

If the identities of children and benefactors involved in “designer baby” programs needed to remain hidden, how many of them are walking around us today?

If the alleged victim’s diary is accurate, where are her children—and where are the children of any other women subjected to being treated as human incubators?

We can’t shift the chaos until we name it clearly. When we can recognize what’s really pushing us–in our personal lives and as a society—we already have a degree of freedom from it. Disturbing information can paradoxically remind us of the greater good. It’s the courage of the people and the love for the common good that bring these injustices to light–fueling open dialogue and constructive action.

We are here to take part in the unfolding of human experience and evolution including its darkest of lessons. Let’s help co-create a safer, healthier, and conscious world to live in.

This is Pt. 2 of our investigation into the latest Epstein files.

With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today’s headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who’s elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power. We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

Above: 12-min video of me and Joe Martino from Collective Evolution breaking down the latest Epstein files to provide deeper sensemaking and clarity on humanity's darkest lessons.

Every so often we uncover seeds of truth that challenge everything we think we know about how power really works, about the human choices underneath major global events like wars, economic and social upheavals, and about the true price of success for those who rise to power. These glimpses into the machine reveal the extraordinary lengths powerful elites will go to dominate and control others. Within this hidden machinery is the trafficking, rape, torture, and murder of children for sexual blackmail and mind control purposes.

In this brief Substack investigation, we explore a few documents in the latest Epstein files release that warrant a closer look: an interview of an alleged Epstein victim documented by a NYPD detective working within the Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force. We also present powerful evidence that the interview fits a well-established pattern of some of the most egregious and verifiable forms of abuse sanctioned by the highest levels of power.

Before we dive in, we recommend opening to any inner guidance you might have in asking for discernment, open-mindedness, and courage as you read this material. As the human family comes to terms with the darkness that exists on this planet, the scale of the forces involved can make us feel powerless and afraid. Yet collective transformation and healing become possible when what long existed in the shadows is brought into conscious awareness.

‘He was raped by George Bush 1’

Despite how much has already been exposed in the latest Epstein files, what we’re seeing is far from the whole picture. The document release likely contains misinformation and has been manipulated to create a specific public perception of the situation that’s incomplete, sensationalized, or misleading. At best, we’re peeping through a keyhole to get a look into a vast and cluttered room that few are truly familiar with.

Even within this fragmented and distorted landscape, some documents warrant careful attention:

• A disturbing letter to a US attorney from an attorney representing survivors abused by individuals that matched “descriptions and circumstances” of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

• An FBI report documents the story of an unnamed victim’s experiences with Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Prince Andrew, and lawyer Alan Dershowitz.

• Another FBI report provides a glimpse into the secret activities that took place in Epstein’s Manhattan home, where Epstein had girls under constant surveillance and isolated from each other—ensuring girls brought ID to confirm they were under 18. The report states “the younger the better” and that Epstein never rejected a girl for being too young.

• An FBI FD-302 (a formal memorandum of interview) recording of an in-person interview conducted by federal agents with an unnamed individual who was served a subpoena. The document states that the Palm Beach Police Department surveilled Epstein’s house and observed prepubescent kids with braces and backpacks coming from school.

• A complaint submitted to the FBI by an alleged victim who is willing to testify and provide evidence and/or more detailed descriptions of events. This alleged victim describes being taken to “pedophile ring parties” by her father and was subjected to traumatizing abuse at the hands of Ghislaine Maxwell, Prince Andrew, Epstein, and more.

In this piece, we’ll be focusing on two files: 1) a 2019 FBI report of an interview with an alleged victim of Epstein’s network who was referred by a former FBI agent and journalist, and 2) internal emails between NYPD and FBI task force agents summarizing that interview. At the time of writing this Substack, the FBI report is still available. The internal email was taken down from the DOJ webpage yet it’s still available on the Wayback Machine. Screenshots are below.

According to the alleged victim’s sworn statement, he first met Jeffrey Epstein at about age 4 in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, where he was raped by his great-uncle while Epstein was present but did not participate. The statement further alleges that at roughly age 8, he encountered Epstein again on a large yacht (some of his relatives were allegedly members of Epstein’s yacht club). On the yacht, he was subjected to a “medical” examination by an unknown doctor in the presence of his great uncle and another family member. He then stated that he was raped by Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton aboard this yacht while heavily drugged. He alleged that Henry Kissinger, George Soros, and Donald Trump were on the boat. His statement also contained other disturbing information, including that he was raped by George Bush 1 and was exposed to ritual abuse and murder (ritual meaning acts that take place in a organized, symbolic, or ceremonial context).

Why this warrants a closer look: This isn’t a tip line, it’s a formal law enforcement interview with a named victim. And even though it may seem unbelievable at first glance, the alleged victim’s story fits a well-established and well-documented pattern.

In fact, George Bush Sr. has long been implicated by multiple people, youth, and CIA insiders for being involved in child sex abuse. Investigations by federal and District authorities uncovered a CIA sexual blackmail operation that brought underage boys on “midnight tours” of Bush’s White House. Clients included key officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations, US military officers, businessmen, lawyers, bankers, congressional aides, and media stars.

Dr. Steve Pieczenik, a former Department of State official who held many roles within US politics, including serving as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, stated the following in 2019, “It has been rampant in our government … Bush Sr. had a whole group of young Hispanic men who he groomed and played with. Hillary and Bill Clinton along with their friend Mr. Epstein went down to the Bahamas and they were molesting and utilizing young girls and boys to have sexual pleasures, but nothing was done about the fact that Jeffrey Epstein had been guilty and convicted of that crime.”

We’re taught that we are a free and equal society where no one is above the rules—where corruption is limited to individual villains who are often conveniently on the other side of the political aisle. Yet the Epstein files present a much deeper reckoning: what does justice and accountability mean when people like Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” and where the whole system shielded him and his associates from the gravity of his crimes since at least 2008?

A Brief History of High-Level Child Sex Abuse and Trafficking

The idea of children being harmed “for a higher good” is ancient. Aztec, Mayan, Greek, Rome, and many other societies normalized child sacrifices, pedophilia, cannibalism, secret societies, and ritual abuse. Things we today consider inconceivable were rampant and normalized. As the human family has evolved, these disturbing activities have become practices in smaller and smaller settings.

At WantToKnow.info, we’ve archived over 800 stories of verifiable sexual abuse scandals—exposing cover-ups within elite networks, religious institutions, government agencies, the medical establishment, the military-industrial complex, Hollywood’s pedophilia networks, and beyond. To explore the extensive work we’ve done, go to our navigation bar on our homepage, select “More” and find “Sexual Abuse Scandals.”

For example, we’ve done in-depth research on:

• the history of intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations

• the child sex trafficking ring at the heart of the British Establishment, where then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher personally protected Peter Hayman, one of the most senior figures in British intelligence and diplomacy, after police identified him as a member of the Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE) network

• the Belgian child sex trafficking ring, where official investigations revealed that child sex slaves were raped, recorded on video for blackmail purposes, and forced to participate in acts of sadism, torture, and ritual murder at the hands of senior judges, politicians, bankers, and influential figures.

• a 2017 Netherlands-based DVM TV interview with former Dutch banker Ronald Bernard, who broke down in tears about witnessing ritualistic child sacrifices in the upper levels of the financial world

Perhaps the most revealing and well-documented example of these kinds of high-level abuses in the US is the Franklin Scandal.

What you have to understand, [Senator John DeCamp], is that sometimes there are forces and events too big, too powerful, with so much at stake for other people or institutions, that you cannot do anything about them, not matter how evil or wrong they are and no matter how dedicated or sincere you are or how much evidence you have. That is simply one of the hard facts of life you have to face. You have done your part. You have tried to expose the evil and wrongdoing. It has hurt you terribly. But it has not killed you up to this point. I am telling you, get out of this before it does. Sometimes things are just too big for us to deal with, and we have to step aside and let history take its course. — Former CIA Director William Colby, The Franklin Cover-Up

After serving as a Nebraska state senator for 16 years, Vietnam War veteran John DeCamp began investigating the 1988 collapse of Omaha’s Franklin Community Federal Credit Union under multi-millionaire businessman, close Bush ally, and former chair of the Nebraska Black Republican Council Larry E. King. What began as an investigation into tens of millions of dollars missing from the credit union turned into a much larger conspiracy that involved a nationwide child abuse ring, CIA sexual blackmail operations, child pornography, drug trafficking, and ritual murder of children. This became known as the Franklin Scandal, which DeCamp lays out plainly in his book The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska. (full text here—page numbers cited below are from the book).

The Franklin Scandal was a series of official investigations involving the Nebraska State Legislature, state and federal grand juries, court testimonies, and sealed records. There was even a Discovery Channel documentary on the scandal that was produced called Conspiracy of Silence, which did not get aired. An insider saved a rough cut, which you can watch here.

Many children involved came from the foster care system, and were flown across the US and sexually abused by officials and elites at the highest levels of power. Children implicated local Omaha officials, police chiefs, judges, politicians, members of Congress, and celebrities. Independent eyewitness reports placed George Bush Sr. at King’s sex parties across the country (p. 12, 176-177, 322). In Loretta Smith’s case file for the Legislature’s Franklin committee, she was around 9 years old when she was taken from the Girl’s Club in Omaha. Over the next year, she would be drugged, raped, and forced to participate in child and animal sacrifices (p. 18-24). Loretta was told by the men that “they must sacrifice for power.” Most importantly, the information Loretta gave to hospital staff and police overlapped and corroborated with what was already in the hands of authorities from children in three separate cases.

Paul Bonacci was approximately 8 years old when he was allegedly taken on hundreds of trips across the country to be trafficked and abused. In his video deposition, he described these trips to the Senate’s private investigator Gary Caradori, including an experience where he was flown to a wooded area (later identified as the Bohemian Grove) and forced to participate in gruesome sexual acts and murder. A snuff film was made of these events. (p. 102-105).

“If they wanted to get something passed in the legislature, he would put some people that were against it in a compromising position, by using us boys and girls.”
— From the deposition of Paul Bonacci, Franklin ring survivor

More than a dozen people investigating the Franklin case died under mysterious circumstances including Gary Caradori, the Senate’s private investigator, who had compiled a list of 271 victims and was facing escalating threats after obtaining evidence that would “blow the lid off” the case. Shortly after this, Caradori and his son were killed in a plane crash. The National Transportation Safety Board investigation found that the plane had exploded in the air. Caradori’s briefcase and other items with possible evidence were missing from the crash (p. 373-374).

State and federal grand juries concluded that the allegations were unfounded, labeling them a “carefully crafted hoax” despite evidence that the Grand Juries were rigged from the start. In fact, all the men who were instrumental in rigging the hearings were promoted to high-level court positions. Yet if the allegations were baseless, why did a 1999 civil court find Larry King liable and award Paul Bonacci $1 million in damages from the sustained abuse and psychological trauma he endured involving organized child abuse, sex trafficking, and satanic rituals?

Below, DeCamp recalls his interaction with Judge Enbody, a Nebraska Supreme Court appointee for these hearings. DeCamp later learned that Judge Embody had just been appointed to the Court of Appeals, a very substantial advancement in his career that likely ensured the case was handled in a way that protected certain individuals.

“As God is my witness, I do not think that there is a judge or other person involved in this case who does not know that horrible injustice has been done. Your Honor, a person has to be deaf, dumb, blind, and totally dishonest, not to know that some of this state’s and nation’s top businessmen and public officials have engaged in the worst crimes possible, which are now being covered up. And these kids, instead of being honored and protected for exposing these things, are being sent to prison. Why? Why? Why?”

Judge Enbody looked at me. Slowly, his voice shaking, he began to talk. “I am just a man. I am not a god. I wish I were. I have no choice in what I have done. I am just a man, just a man, not a god,” Judge Enbody concluded. He appeared even more shaken and upset than I was.

What they all have done, and will continue to do: Protect the “system” at all costs. The “system” is the only ultimate sacred cow-not any particular law or constitution, but only “the system.” Because, ultimately, it is the system which makes certain that the individuals functioning within it-from judges to lawyers, to prosecutors, to politicians, to businessmenhave their places and positions, and opportunities and pecking order, and future.

The Mind Control Connection

Protecting the “system” at all costs likely involved many serious crimes in addition to kids being abused. In Bonacci’s video deposition, he alleged that he was involved in covert US government programs linked to the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA mind control and psychological warfare program.

Bonacci and other child victims gave evidence on the central role of Lt. Col. Michael Aquino at the military bases they were taken to within these programs. Aquino was a military intelligence operative, founder of a satanic church, and co-author of MINDWAR, a psychological operations manual for the DoD. Aquino had been at the center of the San Francisco Presidio military base scandal in the 80s, where federal investigations discovered that dozens of preschool children suffered from ritual abuse, sexually transmitted infections and other sex-related injuries, child pornography, and kidnapping. No one was charged for these abuses, and in the fall of 1987, a series of fires would destroy the daycare center and the surrounding buildings that contained many records related to the center.

Bonacci alleged that he was taken to the Offutt US Air Force Base near Omaha at age 3 where he and many other children were subjected to torture, heavy drugging, and sexual degradation for the purpose of creating “multiple personalities” that would then be programmed as desired to create spies, “drug mules,” prostitutes, or assassins. He was also allegedly instructed in “military arts” including assassination and spying.

This may sound insane to some people, yet declassified CIA documents and landmark Senate investigation hearings proved the existence of these programs.

Most MKULTRA records were destroyed in 1973 by CIA director Richard Helms, so much remains unknown about the 150+ subprograms sponsored by MKULTRA. Yet what we do know is that Project ARTICHOKE was absorbed into MKULTRA, which became the CIA’s umbrella program for behavior and mind control research. In p. 16-18 of this compilation of declassified ARTICHOKE files, the nature of the research included these specific goals: Can we create an action contrary to an individual’s basic moral principles? Can we guarantee total amnesia under any and all conditions? Could we seize a subject and in the space of an hour by hypnotic control have him crash an airplane? Can we in a matter of an hour, two hours, one day, etc., induce [a condition] in an unwilling subject to such an extent that he will perform an act for our benefit?

Documents openly discuss efforts to create dissociative states, induce total amnesia, fragment personality, and alter identity through drugging, electroshock, sleep deprivation, torture, and other trauma-based methods. More than 80 universities, prisons, pharma companies and hospitals participated in MKULTRA. Doctor Ewan Cameron, who became one of the world’s leading psychiatrists, developed techniques used by Nazi scientists to wipe out existing personalities of people, many of them children. At the Allan Memorial Institute in Canada, countless people were reduced to childlike states and unable to recognize their own family members.

Young women were hypnotized and trained to plant bombs and kill people. One declassified document explicitly records an instructor using hypnosis to sexually assault a young woman without her awareness. Another declassified CIA document describes the creation of multiple personalities in two 19-year old girls. “H” is shorthand for hypnotic, hypnotized, or hypnotism in these documents: “These subjects have clearly demonstrated that they can pass from a fully awake state to a deep H controlled state ... by telephone, by receiving written matter, or by the use of code, signal, or words and that control of those hypnotized can be passed from one individual to another without great difficulty. It has also been shown by experimentation with these girls that they can act as unwilling couriers for information purposes.”

Over the years, people have come out to allege that they were recovered survivors of these programs. Carol Rutz wrote a book, A Nation Betrayed, which investigates the 18,000 pages of declassified government mind control documents along with her own personal experience as a survivor of these secret programs. Read our 10-pg summary of her book.

KCOP’s nightly “UPN News 13” covered the story of Brice Taylor, who came out in the 90s testifying that she was a survivor of organized sexual abuse, trafficking, and mind-control programs linked to powerful political and intelligence figures in the United States. You can access the full text of her book, Thanks For The Memories..The Truth Has Set Me Free! The Memoirs of Bob Hope’s and Henry Kissinger’s Mind-Controlled Slave here.

For more, explore our comprehensive news database on mind control.

Integrating the Darkness

It takes a toll on our humanity to face this material and the depravity that’s out there in the world. In these moments, it’s helpful to take a step back and tap into a larger context.

We can’t shift the chaos until we name it clearly. When we can recognize what’s really pushing us–in our personal lives and as a society–we already have a degree of freedom from it. Disturbing information can paradoxically remind us of the greater good. It’s the courage of the people and the love for the common good that bring these injustices to light–fueling open dialogue and constructive action. We invite you to read a powerful essay titled “You Were Made For This” by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

Long story short: we chose to be here – to take part in the unfolding of human experience and evolution including its darkest of lessons. Let’s help co-create a safer, healthier, and conscious world to live in.

This is Pt. 1 of our investigation into the latest Epstein files.

With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today’s headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who’s elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power. We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

This reflection feels especially relevant today, as we enter the Season for Nonviolence, a global 64-day educational and grassroots campaign dedicated to the strategic and spiritual legacy of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It begins on the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination (January 30th) and ends on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination (April 4th). Both men were murdered for challenging entrenched systems of power through disciplined and principled nonviolence.

On a personal level, the work of nonviolence changed my life. It helped me recognize, heal, and transform trauma and patterns of violence that had lived within me and my family. It redirected my life’s work toward restorative justice, conflict resolution, and holistic health studies, and now toward building a more mindful and conscious media movement that moves beyond fear, division, and polarization to bring about constructive social and political change.

The Season for Nonviolence (64 days, or nine weeks) is divided into three arenas of practice: I. Self (Mind, Body, Spirit); II. Others (Communication and Relationship); and III. Earth (Eco-Global). Together, these three arenas form an integrated focus on humanity’s movement toward greater personal, social, and environmental health.

Over the next three months, we’ll explore the causes and cures of violence, drawing on real-world examples and stories that heal and remind us of what’s possible.

What Is Nonviolence?

It hurts to witness violence, it hurts to experience violence, and it hurts to inflict violence. Each causes trauma. Yes, we need to fight. But only so that we can create spaces to heal and to build. Nonviolence requires us to look at the pain that we carry ourselves, and the pain that we inflict on each other within our communities. It is easy to point the finger and say that the violence is "over there." Nonviolence ... is the science of understanding conflict, much like cosmology is the science of understanding the origins of the universe.
— nonviolent activist and restorative justice practitioner Kazu Haga, Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm

The word “nonviolence” entered the English language in the 1920s as a rough translation of the Sanskrit term ahimsa, meaning the power that comes into effect when the desire to harm, kill, or dehumanize is eliminated. In its original sense, nonviolence does not mean the absence of violence. It was never meant to describe passivity, avoidance, or the tolerance of abuse. Much of the confusion today comes from using “nonviolence” to mean simply not fighting back, even when harm continues, or treating it as a temporary strategy that can be abandoned if it seems ineffective. Neither reflects what Gandhi or King actually practiced.

Gandhi and King called for principled nonviolence, a strategic set of skills, actions, and principles to:

1) understand violence and the systems and conditions that produce it
2) hold systems and people accountable without enemy-making and dehumanization
3) create pathways toward open dialogue, reconciliation, and workable alternatives that benefit all parties

In the video above, I explore the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi in greater depth.

Why the Season for Nonviolence Matters Right Now

The opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may well be another profound truth.
—theoretical physicist Niels Bohr

The extreme polarization of our time is not simply political. It is a sign that we have lost access to deeper forms of sensemaking. We have become trapped in emotionally charged narratives that flatten complexity and desensitize us to ourselves, to one another, and to the full range of perspectives that must be integrated for meaningful change to occur.

Seen clearly, this moment isn’t a crisis but a turning point. To address our collective problems, we have to make them bigger. What we are witnessing is not the creation of division, but its exposure. Nonviolence offers a framework for engaging that exposure in humanizing and constructive ways.

Violence is not just an act of harm that inflicts pain and fractures relationship with ourselves, others, and all life. It is a way of seeing that makes harm and pain feel justified. Once a society accepts the belief that “the other side” is irredeemable, the remaining tools become force, coercion, domination, and censorship. And in the world of nonviolence, all forms of violence (not just physical) violate the essential interconnectedness of all beings.

Nonviolence sees truth and peace as inseparable. King believed any successful social movement must be rooted in agape, the Greek word for a form of love that recognizes the inherent worth and dignity of every human soul. King called agape “disinterested love,” because it doesn’t matter whether the object of your agape loves you back or not. Agape is the type of love that is capable of building Beloved Community.

Compassion and truth are not zero-sum games, where one person or group’s gain comes only from another’s loss. Having empathy and understanding for one side doesn’t take away from the empathy and understanding I have for the other side. Understanding different views doesn't diminish my view. What if we worked with our differences, not to keep score or assign blame, but to deepen our understanding?

Being nonviolent is also not simply about loving others. It’s about opening up to intellectual humility, nuance, and viewpoint diversity (wholeness). To have the courage to be curious about what we don’t know—moving beyond the unconscious ways we protect our identity and self-image, and to notice where fear of judgment or cancel culture shapes what we are willing to say, question, or explore beyond what we know.

When curiosity is sidelined by fear, false binaries begin to dominate. Social conflict is managed through a dualistic lens where the only choices are win or lose. Nonviolence reveals a third choice: reimagine. We need new tools, skills, ideas, and actions that match the level of complexity in the environment and embody the world we actually want.

Everything we do should build toward reconciliation - the art of repairing relationships. In nonviolence, our commitment to healing relationships requires that we listen to opposing perspectives to develop empathy and understanding. [This] does not mean you condone … or agree with their conclusions. The purpose is to gather more information about the conflict so you can see the full picture. Without understanding how the other side is viewing the conflict, you are responding to the conflict with only 50 percent of the story (yours). When I listen for the perspective from which those opinions are coming, I hear genuine concerns and fears and genuine attempts to understand our world to figure out what’s best for society.

Building Beloved Community is … about cultivating love for those that are difficult to love. The others. The people who voted for that guy. The people who work in the very systems that are destroying our communities. The corrupt corporate CEO. The foreign dictator responsible for countless deaths. Social activist Dorothy Day said, “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”

[This] is when we begin to enter into the shugyo of nonviolence [training the spirit, mind, and body]. Shugyo is not only about learning a tactical skill. It is about engaging in what Gandhi called “self-purification,” which involves purifying our own selves of trauma, hatred, and delusion.
— nonviolent activist and restorative justice practitioner Kazu Haga, Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm

Nonviolence Principles

Gandhian Principles of Nonviolence

“The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts; that is where the battle should be fought. My life is my message.” — Mahatma Gandhi

1. Oneness
All life is one/interconnected. Our oneness calls us to work for the well-being of all.
2. Satyagraha (Force of Truth or Soul Force)
Nonviolence is the pursuit of truth, grounded in integrity and the willingness to confront untruth.
3. Ahimsa (Non-Injury)
The practice of nonviolence through love and selfless service to prevent suffering. This principle lies at the heart of many spiritual and religious traditions.
4. Absorbing Suffering
Nonviolence accepts suffering without retaliation when confronting untruth, recognizing that violence cannot be eliminated through violence.
5. Trust and the Release of Fear
NV living is a trust in life and the journey of becoming increasingly free from fear

Kingian Principles of Nonviolence

1. Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people.
2. Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate.
3. Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding.
4. Nonviolence holds that suffering for a cause can educate and transform.
5. Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.
6. Nonviolence holds that the universe is on the side of justice, and that right will eventually prevail.

Everyday, I get to learn from people who have survived so much violence and in many cases have inflicted so much harm, yet have transformed to become some of the greatest peacemakers I’ve ever met. The core of the theory of nonviolence for me has become an unwavering faith in the nature of humanity. That at our core, we are a species that wants to be in service and relationship; that we have the resiliency to heal no matter how hurt we are, and we have the ability to transform no matter how much harm we’ve caused.
— nonviolent activist and restorative justice practitioner Kazu Haga

We can’t shift the chaos we’re in until we name it clearly. When we can recognize what’s really pushing us—in our personal lives and as a society—we already have a degree of freedom from it. We don’t all have to agree on the specifics of a clear path forward, but can’t we agree that another way is possible beyond violence on the streets and a society so polarized that we turn on each other? It seems as though any societal shift begins with a consciousness shift in how we think and relate to ourselves, others, and the world.

May we free ourselves from excessive fear and transform “us” vs. “them” in thought and action as we work for the well-being of all.

With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today’s headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who’s elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power. We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

Recently, I’ve become co-host for a weekly podcast series called The Catalyst with Joe Martino from Collective Evolution, Dr. Madhava Setty, and political consultant and civil rights advocate David Helfrich. On a weekly basis, we’ll be having conversations that seek to restore signal in a noisy media landscape in hopes of restoring clarity and catalyzing transformation.

This past week, we discussed the tragic ICE shooting in Minneapolis and the deeper crisis behind America’s growing unrest. Here’s the 14-min short take:

Regardless of where you stand on the immigration issue, it can’t be understood in isolation. For example, some of the most devastating drug epidemics were supported at the highest levels of the US government, which protected major drug traffickers while profiting from the trade. The ethnic scapegoating of immigrants is an intellectual shortcut, obscuring the fact that decades of US regime-change efforts, covert wars, and economic destabilization abroad helped create the conditions people are now fleeing from.

Yet there’s even a deeper dimension to this conversation beyond immigration. As I discuss in my conversation with Joe, today’s flashpoint events—from ICE protests to the chaos of January 6—are expressions of a deeper institutional crisis brought about because our systems do not represent the voices of the people.

Whether the flashpoint is immigration, elections, or other complex topics, the same pattern repeats: systemic failures create real pain, but the blame is pushed onto groups and the actors on the stage rather than the structures that produced them. Legitimate public anger is redirected into emotionally charged narratives that divide the public and flatten complex realities. Research shows that we vastly overestimate how extreme those with opposing views actually are. Studies also show that people vastly overestimate how immoral the other side is and how willing they are to subvert democracy. A self-fulfilling prophecy then unfolds when our fears about the other side become the justification for our own extreme behavior.

Today’s unrest is a predictable breaking point and a collective awakening.

In this Substack, we examine the long history of US military and intelligence operations to:

deploy violence and weapons of war on American streets

squash dissent and target activist movements across the political spectrum,

and misrepresent threats to make people afraid of each other and easier to manipulate.

Lastly, this piece closes with a call for unity and viewpoint diversity as a stabilizing force in an era where division is increasingly used to justify authoritarian power.

Setting Context: The Government Study That Predicted Civil Unrest in the 60s

In 1968, the US Office of Education partnered with The Stanford Research Institute (which later became SRI International), bringing together accredited scholars to study social problems and analyze where society was headed. This research produced The Changing Images of Man, which looked at how a vast array of societal challenges were playing out over time, and how the future might consequently unfold.

When they mapped out 50 plausible futures, it became immediately clear that few of these scenarios were actually desirable. Every aspect of society would have to transform in order to bring about any desirable future, one that could sustain a complex society over time and support human development and well-being.

Policymakers understood that while the current system appeared normal and successful on the surface, it was generating cascading crises underneath: environmental degradation, consolidation of bureaucratic and corporate power, growing inequality, the reduction of human value to economic output rather than whole human beings with intrinsic value. If business as usual were to continue, authors warned, “social regulation” would increasingly rely on suppressing nonconformity, dissent, and rational public responses to worsening social conditions. This would require what they called “friendly fascism”: a socio-technocratic system that manages unrest through military power, mass policing, and narrative engineering.

In other words, society’s escalating crises were not caused by ignorance or lack of foresight, but by the commitment to business as usual: a rigged system that was always designed to protect the rich and powerful.

Militarized police forces feed a for-profit, mass incarceration system responsible for unspeakable human rights atrocities while doing very little to rehabilitate offenders, reduce crime, or stop the flow of drugs in our cities. Under both Trump’s first term and Biden’s, sexual violence, suicides, deaths, and hunger strikes soared in ICE detention centers. Solitary confinement in ICE detention centers increased in frequency and duration under the Biden administration. Now, immigration detention has become a booming business for private prison giants and shadowy security and weapons firms while ICE has doubled in size in one year–rushing new recruits in despite allegations of poor vetting and training.

A private military contractor formerly known as Blackwater—the mercenary firm whose government work was linked to fraud, civilian killings, and reaping hundreds of millions off the Afghan drug trade—has now been contracted to assist ICE in tracking down immigrants in exchange for monetary bounties. This bounty-based approach mirrors a core tactic of the War on Terror, when US forces offered cash rewards for tips that fueled mass detentions in Afghanistan and beyond. This swept up thousands of people who posed no threat and had no ties to terrorism.

The ever-growing expansion of the national security state is a predictable consequence of sustaining an increasingly illegitimate system. As the powerful have exerted more and more control over the population, dissent itself has come to be treated as a national security or terrorist threat.

Mission Creep

Mission creep is the progressive expansion of military-intelligence operations beyond its original mission and scope.

American police and military forces have spent years preparing for military conflict within the US. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act restricting the military’s role in domestic law enforcement and surveillance was already at risk of being violated back in 2008. War-zone weapons and surveillance technology have been hitting American streets for decades. Some of these weapons and technologies were once classified and originally deployed in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Evidence shows that militarized policing does not make communities safer and is linked to greater violence and repression. Multiple studies have found that police departments with access to military equipment kill civilians at higher rates, adopt more aggressive tactics that erode public trust and escalate conflict, and fail to reduce crime or protect officers. In fact, comparative research across 100+ countries shows that police militarization correlates with greater likelihood of state repression.

Militarized forces in the US have been used for routine policing tasks and even calls regarding mental health incidents and suicide attempts. In 2014, the ACLU reported that SWAT teams were overwhelmingly used to violently raid homes of people suspected of committing nonviolent crimes, even small organic farms for code violations and food co-ops suspected of selling unpasteurized milk products.

In 2016, The Boston Globe reported how the Food and Drug Administration, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Internal Revenue Service, Department of Veterans Affairs, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Social Security Administration all spent millions on firearms, ammunition, and military-style gear. At least 67 civilian federal agencies collectively spent nearly $1.5 billion on weaponry between 2006 and 2014.

In 2025, the Trump administration reviewed plans to create a rapid-response domestic force of hundreds of National Guard troops to be deployable to US cities within an hour to respond to protests or unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Programs like the 1122 program (created in 1994) and 1033 program (created in 1997) normalized militarizing police, allowing the Pentagon to give law enforcement agencies lethal and non-lethal warfare weapons without the approval or even knowledge of elected government officials. Since then, the two programs have funneled at least $8 billion worth of military-grade equipment into US law enforcement, including assault rifles, grenade launchers, bayonets, combat knives, rapid fire weapons, armored vehicles, military tanks, explosives and pyrotechnics, camouflage gear and other “deception equipment.”

In a 2017 sting operation, the General Accountability Office obtained over 100 controlled items from the 1033 program—including night-vision goggles and pipe bomb materials—with a total estimated value of $1.2 million. All it took was the creation of a fake law enforcement agency, website, and shipping address. The GAO’s fraudulent application was processed and approved within a week.
– The Pentagon’s Hand-Me-Downs Helped Militarize Police. Here’s How, Vice News

Non-lethal weapons developed for war have been turned against the domestic population despite their use violating the accepted standards of human rights worldwide. Tear gas, for example, is prohibited in war under the Chemical Weapons Convention, yet routinely deployed by police against protesters and prisoners. They’re often sold to military and law enforcement as more humane options for crowd control, yet it’s well known that these weapons have caused serious injury, long-term health risks, and death in the past.

Sound weapons developed for war have increasingly been used against civilian populations and protestors. These technologies have demonstrated the ability to knock demonstrators off their feet and induce nausea. Acoustic or sonic weapons can vibrate the insides of humans to stun them, nauseate them, or even “liquefy their bowels and reduce them to quivering diarrheic messes,” according to a Pentagon briefing. These devices can also cause excruciating pain, with some able to heat up skin from a distance and others that can beam sound into the skull of a human.

How Dissent Became Terrorism

We’re told that domestic militarized policing protects the community from terrorism. Yet how much does that mean when the FBI has had a notorious history of manufacturing terrorist plots, often targeting vulnerable minors who have significant cognitive and intellectual disabilities yet no history of harming anyone. Read more about terrorism plots hatched by the US government, including cases in which alleged terrorists were acting on behalf of the CIA. This process not only pads arrest and prosecution statistics but also helps justify big budgets by misrepresenting the threat of terrorism.

Since 9/11, the term terrorism has expanded to include any activist group across the spectrum not in favor of the political establishment.

• The Occupy Wall Street movement, one of the largest mass protest movements in modern U.S. history (roughly 2011–2016), was not only surveilled but aggressively suppressed using counterterrorism tools and violent policing tactics. Protesters were met with mass arrests, baton charges, tear gas, rubber bullets, and militarized crowd-control tactics. As reported by The Guardian and The New York Times, newly released documents revealed that the FBI and DHS coordinated with local police, fusion centers, universities, and major banks to surveil, disrupt, and suppress Occupy—despite repeatedly acknowledging it was a peaceful movement. Occupy was monitored through counterterrorism units and categorized under “domestic terrorism” frameworks.

• In 2014, protests in Ferguson, Missouri erupted after Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer. Internal documents show that the Missouri National Guard used militarized language, labeling protesters as “enemy forces” and “adversaries,” with even “general protesters” characterized as a hate group.

• In 2019, investigative reporting and court records showed that the FBI collaborated with the factory-farming industry to place animal-rights activists under weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) investigative frameworks, exploring criminal charges—including attempted use of a WMD—that could carry life sentences despite the absence of conventional weapons or mass casualties. Similarly, a nonviolent protest against military base expansion in 2023 led the FBI to open a terrorism investigation, while the local sheriff documented the incident as a hate crime.

• In 2021, the ACLU warned of the Biden administration’s domestic terrorism strategy. It marked the first time a national counterterrorism framework was formally established to address domestic terrorism. While focused primarily on white-supremacist violence, the ACLU cautioned that the strategy risked entrenching biased law-enforcement practices and expanding surveillance powers that could ultimately be turned against constitutionally protected dissent.

• In 2022, the DHS began officially associating terrorism with anti-government or anti-authority sentiment. The DHS National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin explicitly noted that “domestic violent extremists have expressed grievances based on perceptions that the government is overstepping its Constitutional authorities or failing to perform its duties,” effectively associating terrorism with anti-government or anti-authority sentiments.

• Around the same time, the DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board linked domestic terrorism to the spread of narratives seen as undermining trust in government and public institutions. Issues to be censored included COVID origins, vaccines, US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of US support to Ukraine. The board itself was short-lived after widespread backlash once people understood that it would put the government in charge of deciding what Americans are allowed to say—undermining free speech, civil liberties, and the open debate a functioning democracy depends on. Yet internal documents show the broader disinformation and extremism-monitoring efforts continued largely unchanged.

The fears of right-wing extremism/terrorism groups have become a central focus, particularly after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.

The Oklahoma City bombing was one of the most impactful terrorist attacks on US soil. The attack was carried out by far-right extremists with suspicious ties to the FBI, as evidenced by a sworn declaration from Terry Lynn Nichols, the only surviving convict in the case. Nichols claimed that his co-conspirator, Timothy McVeigh, revealed he was taking orders from a high-ranking FBI official, raising serious questions about the extent of government involvement in the bombing plot.

We were told to believe that January 6 was a violent insurrection aimed at overthrowing legitimate government and staging a coup. The events of that day continue to receive extensive media coverage, with a group called the Proud Boys held largely responsible for organizing the rebellion. But it was barely reported that the leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio was an FBI informant. In fact, the FBI had as many as eight informants within the Proud Boys during the Capitol storming.

As the New York Times reported, “despite the vast amount of evidence the government collected in the case — including more than 500,000 encrypted text messages — investigators never found a smoking gun that conclusively showed the Proud Boys plotted to help President Donald J. Trump remain in office.” The FBI found “scant evidence“ that there was an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result. In fact, a senior law enforcement official emphasized that the majority of those arrested acted independently, driven more by personal grievances against the political establishment than by any coordinated effort to undermine the electoral process. Our video, How to Transform Media Polarization, One Echo Chamber At A Time, (link starts at 11:45) explores this complex issue in further detail.

When violence erupts, it provides the perfect excuse for public fear, surveillance expansion, and narrative control. Did federal agencies let the chaos unfold that day or use it as a way to justify crackdowns on dissent?

There is little that unites me with those who occupied the Capitol building on Jan. 6. But that does not mean I support the judicial lynching against many of those who participated in the Jan. 6 events, a lynching that is mandating years in pretrial detention and prison for misdemeanors. Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe. The vast majority of those caught up in the incursion of the Capitol did not commit serious crimes, engage in violence or know what they would do in Washington other than protest the election results. We are exacerbating the growing tribalism and political antagonisms that will increasingly express themselves through violence. We are complicit, once again, of using the courts to carry out vendettas. We are corroding democratic institutions. We are hardening the ideology and rage of the far-right.
— Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges, Lynching the Deplorables

Human Unity and Viewpoint Diversity: The Only Real Paths to Freedom From the Control Regime

Perhaps a greater threat to society than terrorism itself is the misrepresentation of extremism and terrorism to make people afraid of each other and therefore easier to manipulate.

When Nigeria’s government failed to address the country’s stark inequality, nationwide protests united Nigerians across religious and ethnic lines. During protests, Muslims would pray while Christians formed a protective human chain around them. National Secretary of the Initiative For a Better and Brighter Nigeria observed that “If there is hunger in the land, the hunger that the Christian is feeling is not different from the hunger the Muslim is feeling.”

Who benefits from creating mass fear in the public that turns us against each other? Politicians and government agencies consolidating their power, the national security and surveillance state profitably expanding its reach, and corporate media capitalizing on strong emotions. After all, the fear of Communism benefitted Adolf Hitler, and made people more willing to conform to harsh militant rule and turn a blind eye to genocide.

In a Yes! Magazine piece, sociologist George Lakey highlights how Norway — despite experiencing the same polarization as Germany in the 1920s and ’30s — did not succumb to fascism during the rise of HItler:

The German left was split terribly within itself: Communist vs. Social Democratic. The split was over vision for the new society. One side demanded abolition of capitalism, and the other side proposed partial accommodation. They were unwilling to compromise, and then, when the Social Democrats took power, armed rebellion and bloody repression followed. The result was the Third Reich.

Meanwhile in Norway, the Norwegian Workers’ Party crafted a vision that seemed both radical and reasonable and won majority support for their view despite the dissent of a very small Communist Party. Grassroots movements built a large infrastructure of co-ops that showed their competency and positivity when the government and political conservatives lacked both. Additionally, activists reached beyond the choir, inviting participation from people who initially feared making large changes.

Norwegians also took a different attitude toward violence. They chose nonviolent direct action campaigns consisting of strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, and occupations—a far less fearsome picture than Nazi Brown Shirts and street fighting. Norway therefore lacked the dangerous chaos that in Germany led the middle classes to accept the elite’s choice of Hitler to bring “law and order.”

The Norwegian set of strategies—vision, co-ops, outreach, and nonviolent direct action campaigns—is within the American skill set. Polarization is nothing to despair over. It’s just a signal that it’s time for [us] to start organizing.

We don’t all have to agree on the specifics of a clear path forward, but can’t we agree that another way is possible beyond violence on the streets and a society so polarized that we turn on each other? Each of us has the responsibility to work with our fears in the face of complex issues that lack clear answers. Destabilization, chaos, and polarization may provoke deeper questions that could help us turn to one another—across our echo chambers, political differences, and our need to be right. It seems as though any societal shift begins with a consciousness shift in how we think and relate to ourselves, others, and the world.

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today’s headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who’s elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power. We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

The Supreme Court of the United States has agreed to take up major agrochemical giant Bayer/Monsanto’s appeal in a landmark glyphosate cancer case. At issue is far more than a single verdict. A ruling in the company’s favor could effectively shield the makers of more than 57,000 pesticide products from future lawsuits.

What Bayer leaves out is that Roundup’s approval was based, in part, on a safety study later revealed to have been ghostwritten by Monsanto scientists and ultimately retracted. That study was used to reassure regulators about glyphosate’s safety while internal company documents showed early concerns about cancer risks.

Meanwhile, Bayer is facing over 170,000 lawsuits in the US. Billions of pounds of pesticides are used each year on our food despite their use being identified as a cancer risk comparable to smoking and despite being outlawed in other countries for its toxic harm. The case asks a fundamental question: do federal regulations exist to protect public health, or to protect corporations from accountability?

Below, we provide a brief summary from our investigative piece, “The Pesticide Crisis Reveals The Dark Side of Science. We Have The Solutions to Regenerate,” exposing undeniable evidence that these toxic chemicals harm and kill humans—and how that evidence was suppressed while science was repurposed as a corporate weapon.

Undeniable Evidence That Pesticides Harm and Kill Humans

• Pesticides are linked to environmental destruction, nervous system damage in bees, and the insect apocalypse itself.

• In children, exposure to pesticides increase the risk of reduced IQs, memory and attention deficits, and autism for prenatal children.

• Pesticides are linked to depression, cancer, brain diseases, birth defects, infertility, organ damage, and other devastating chronic diseases —making it one of the largest corporate liability issues in modern history.

• Some of the chemicals sprayed on our food today were originally developed during World War I and II as nerve agents and poison gases designed to harm and kill humans. Bayer, the company that acquired Monsanto and produces 40% of the world’s glyphosate, grew out of IG Farben — the Nazi-linked chemical giant that helped run the concentration camp at Auschwitz where nerve gases killed hundreds of thousands of European Jews.

• As rates of Parkinson’s have tragically surged especially among the farming community, neurologists now say the disease is largely environmentally caused, driven by long-term exposure to chemicals like paraquat. A 2024 Politico article put it bluntly: “Parkinson’s is a man-made disease.” Why should we trust EPA-approved products are safe when the agency permits tens of millions of pounds of paraquat to be sprayed on our food yet has banned paraquat on golf courses in 2021 due to serious public health risks?

Monsanto’s Propaganda Machine

Mainstream media and authority figures tell us to be outraged by the “attack on science,” but few are willing to face how thoroughly compromised our scientific and media institutions have become due to corporate influence at the highest levels of power. Top editors of world-renowned journals have warned that much of published scientific and medical research is distorted by fraud, corporate influence, and conflicts of interest.

For decades, Monsanto didn’t just manufacture chemicals—it manufactured reality. Behind the PR campaigns about feeding the world was a ruthless strategy to silence critics, rewrite science, and discredit anyone who got in the way. The following key findings are drawn from The Monsanto Papers and compiled in Merchants of Poison: How Monsanto Sold the World on a Toxic Pesticide:

• Buried internal studies expose how Monsanto knew glyphosate was dangerous and cancerous as early as 1983.

• Systemic ghostwriting of scientific studies and safety reviews while colluding with prestigious universities to downplay cancer risks and make them appear independent.

• The creation of a secretive “Fusion Center” (modeled after FBI and homeland security tactics tasked with surveillance and terrorism) which monitored and targeted scientists, activists, celebrities, policymakers, and social media posts using private “watch lists.”

• Coordination with lawmakers to defund the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm and intimidate cancer researchers after it classified glyphosate as a probable carcinogen.

• Collusion with ‘neutral’ front groups like the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) to flood media outlets with industry-approved talking points, label critics as conspiracy theorists, manipulate search results through SEO tactics, and create attack profiles on those who critically reported on the pesticide industry. “You will not get a better value for your dollar,” one Monsanto exec bragged about hiring ACHS. ACSH took hundreds of thousands from chemical giants.

• Weaponization of ‘independent’ experts and front groups to attack organic food, with hit pieces claiming organic food is a scam. A series of emails between Monsanto’s top medical officer Dr. Daniel Goldstein and Dr. Bruce Chassy discussed grassroots advocacy group Moms Across America, where Dr. Goldstein states: “I have been arguing for a week to beat the s*** out of them and have clearly lost,” to which Dr. Chassy responds, “You can’t beat up mothers, even if they are dumb mothers but you can beat up the organic industry that paid for and wrote that letter.”

• A presentation by Jay Byrne, Monsanto’s former director of corporate communications, featured a quote by Michael S. Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Computer Corporation: “Think of the internet as a weapon on the table. Either you pick it up or your competitor does — but somebody is going to get killed.”

It came out earlier this year that a company called V-Fluence, funded by USAID and the USDA, secretly tracked and profiled over 500 scientists, environmental activists, journalists, and food safety advocates—many of whom opposed genetically modified foods and pesticides. The v-Fluence dossiers included private addresses, family details, and derogatory commentary with the goal to threaten and “neutralize” critics with surveillance and reputational smears. Members of this portal included over 1,000 USDA policymakers, State Department officials, agrochemical executives, and lobbyists–all working to protect corporate agriculture interests.

Decades later, Monsanto continues to deploy a full-spectrum campaign of manipulation, intimidation, and scientific deceit to protect its profits no matter the human cost.

Read our full special investigation, “The Pesticide Crisis Reveals The Dark Side of Science. We Have The Solutions to Regenerate,” to learn the full story—including all the inspiring solutions, people-powered movements, and real-world success stories that serve as powerful reminders: we already have the technology, creativity, and social will needed to begin regenerating all life on Earth.

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today’s headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who’s elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power. We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

As chaos in Latin America unfolds, driven by the US and its “war” on drug traffickers, it’s worth revisiting what the war on drugs has always been—and how rarely its deeper realities are examined by the media or by political leaders across the political spectrum.

The purpose of the war was never to stop drug addiction. After more than a trillion dollars spent, addiction is as popular as ever. Global drug markets continue to thrive. More than one million people have died from drug overdoses in the United States since 1999 — a scale of loss that has tragically touched millions of lives. Cartel and organized-crime violence has left a staggering human toll of hundreds of thousands of lives lost.

It’s well known that the war on drugs is considered a trillion dollar failure. A deeper view reveals something more troubling: the war on drugs was intentionally designed to target politically unfavorable groups while protecting the activities of the rich and powerful. This war has operated as a pipeline to feed big banks, CIA covert wars and black budget programs, cartels, and mass incarceration while maintaining rather than disrupting the drug trade itself.

Below, we present undeniable evidence that drug trafficking is an essential tool used by the US government and authoritarian regimes around the world to maintain their preferred balance of power. In fact, the US has supported drug lords, terrorists, and extremist groups in at least 35 countries. We’re here to shine a light into the darkest corners of the drug world, exposing the powerful forces within our own government benefiting from the illicit drug trade.

Setting Context: The War on Drugs Targets Everyday People Through Mass Incarceration

Award-winning photographer and geographer Trevor Paglen’s work offers a rare glimpse into the systems shaping society from behind the scenes.

Paglen began his work as a geographer by using US Geological Survey archives to map and study aerial images of California’s growing prison system. What he discovered was that these prisons were not merely sites of punishment. They were infrastructure that removed people from public life without allowing the public to see the egregious human rights abuses that came along with the incarceration industry.

That insight led Paglen to a realization that would define his work: power operates through physical and digital infrastructures that most people never see.

With the onset of the “war on drugs” in the early 1980s, California had embarked on the largest prison-building project in the history of the world. The state had built 33 prisons in just a few decades. Over the previous 132 years, California had built just twelve. Unlike earlier penitentiaries like Alcatraz, located prominently in the public view as a haunting visual reminder not to break the law, California’s new industrial prisons were built far away from urban centers in the poorest and remotest regions of the state, out of sight and … out of mind. From time to time, stories of torture and extreme violence [within California prisons] make their way into the news.
— Blank Spots on the Map, Trevor Paglan

Paglen eventually recognized that the techniques used to obscure prisons mirrored those used to conceal US military and intelligence operations. This discovery led to his groundbreaking book, Blank Spots on the Map, a comprehensive documentation of secret US military bases, CIA black sites around the world that kidnapped, disappeared and tortured people, and classified facilities deliberately kept beyond democratic oversight.

State secrecy is a form of executive power. It is the power to unilaterally and legitimately conceal events, actions, budgets, programs, and plans from the legislature and public at large — the people who are paying for it. We are living in a world where about 50 or 60 billion dollars is spent in secret every year. We have secret laws, secret interpretations of laws, and secret courts.
— Trevor Paglan

Seen through this lens, mass incarceration begins to look less like a policy failure and more like a system functioning as designed. You cannot build a prison empire without a policy framework capable of continuously producing prisoners, generating millions of arrests and long sentences, and spreading public narratives that make the resulting suffering appear necessary, effective, or justified.

Such a system can’t maintain itself without the many billions of dollars in public spending and private contracts that have turned incarceration into a lucrative industry—from architecture companies, private equity firms, surveillance and telecommunications companies, healthcare contractors, food and agribusiness corporations, to other industries that profit from prison labor and expansion.

How The Deep State Won the War on Drugs

The war on drugs made the prison population explosion possible, providing exactly the right mechanisms to produce huge numbers of prisoners, in part by redefining addiction and low-level drug activity as criminal threats. Violent overpolicing and mass incarceration resulted in fractured social networks and families, damaging trust in government and destroying economic opportunities in communities across the country. Meanwhile, even Richard Nixon, who declared substance use the nation’s “public enemy No. 1,” privately admitted that marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.”

“Look. The Nixon campaign in ‘68 and the Nixon White House had two enemies: Black people and the antiwar left. [V]ilify them night after night on the evening news, and we thought if we can associate heroin with Black people in the public mind and marijuana with the hippies this would be perfect. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
— Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, “Aide says Nixon’s war on drugs targeted blacks, hippies, CNN

Drug-related deaths rose even as incarceration expanded. The United States maintains one of the highest incarceration rates per capita in the world, incarcerating more people and more children overall than any other country in the world. Federal Bureau of Prisons statistics show that drug offenses are the most common offense type in federal prisons. Approximately 43% of people in federal prison are incarcerated for a drug offense, making it the largest single offense category at the federal level (higher than violent crimes, property crimes, etc). Yet despite this tragic reality, mass incarceration has had no measurable impact on reducing drug crime.

In other words, what the war on drugs accomplished instead was the systematic destruction of the social conditions that make healthy communities possible while doing very little to stop the flow of drugs.

Where are the drugs really coming from? How are they being distributed? Many assume today’s drug crises are driven solely by criminals within cartel networks, yet history shows that some of the most devastating drug epidemics were supported at the highest levels of the US government, which protected traffickers while profiting from the trade.

This isn’t just a historical problem. Today, the MS-13 gang and Trump are endorsing the same Honduran presidential candidate. In Venezuela, a country with very low importance in the international drug trade, a leader who resisted US interests was kidnapped and charged with drug crimes.

These developments are just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to corruption related to the war on drugs, the deeper you dig, the more you find.

Timeline of the Stark Reality of the War on Drugs

1860s—Present | Big Banks and Drug Money Laundering

Drug money is generated in cash, but real power requires access to the banking system. That reality places major banks at the center of the drug economy.

HSBC, one of the largest banks in the world, was founded in 1865 to process opium money for the British Empire after the second Opium War. When China had outlawed opium, British European powers slaughtered tens of thousands of Chinese people until they agreed to legalize the dope trade.

Starting in the early 2000s, HSBC would begin laundering money for drug lords, terrorists and rogue states. A US Senate investigation would eventually reveal that HSBC’s Mexican unit moved a total of $7 billion into the bank’s US operations until 2010, with investigators concluding that a significant portion of the money was tied to drug traffickers. HSBC had even changed the size of their bank teller windows to accommodate the size of the cash bags preferred by cartels when making deposits.

[The US Justice Department] issued a fine of $1.9 billion, or about five weeks’ profit but they didn’t extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual. “Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges,” said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, “HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.”
—”Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail” Rolling Stone

While officially on US probation and under the supervision of a court-appointed monitor, leaked government records show that from 2013 to 2017, HSBC processed at least $4.4 billion in transactions it itself flagged as suspicious, often without even knowing who owned the accounts. The FinCEN Files investigation of 2020 revealed how HSBC continued to move large amounts of suspicious money including for shell companies and networks tied to drug trafficking.

HSBC was not an outlier but a case study of the corruption common in the US financial system. At Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo), executives admitted the bank failed to monitor or report suspicious transactions while handling $378 billion for Mexican currency exchange houses, the hidden junction where drug profits leave the street and enter the global banking system. Prosecutors linked this money to planes that moved 22 tons of cocaine and fueled mass deaths from cartel violence across Mexico.

More than a decade later, history repeated again at TD Bank, where investigators uncovered laundering tied to fentanyl trafficking, Colombian drug networks, and human trafficking rings through at least 2023.

During the 2008 financial crisis, UN Office on Drugs and Crime head Antonio Maria Costa stated he had evidence that drug money was the only liquid capital keeping major banks afloat. Costa said desperate banks relaxed due-diligence controls, allowing organized crime money to flow into the financial system with signs that interbank lending relied on funds originating from drug trafficking and other illicit activities.

1950s—1960s | MKULTRA and CIA Drug Experimentation

The CIA’s MKULTRA program involved secret experiments on unwitting human subjects using psychoactive drugs in an effort to explore mind control and psychological warfare. Ordinary people became super spies programmed to carry out assassinations, terrorist acts, sexual favors, and more without conscious knowledge of what they were doing. Aerosol tests of LSD were sprayed inside the New York City subway system. More than 80 universities, prisons, pharma companies and hospitals participated in MKUltra, including renowned psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, who served as the first president of the American Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatric Association.

Cameron would carry out techniques used by Nazi scientists to wipe out the existing personalities of people in his care. At the Allan Memorial Institute in Canada, countless individuals were reduced to childlike states and unable to recognize their own family members. The CIA’s top chemist Sidney Gottlieb hired director of the Nazi Biological Warfare program and former SS officer Kurt Blome to work on chemical warfare research for the CIA and US Army. Gottlieb would then test out “an astonishing variety of drug combinations” on innocent people all over the world to control their consciousness. He would develop a poison handkerchief to kill an Iraqi colonel, a creative variety of poisonous weapons to kill Fidel Castro, and even a poison dart to kill a leftist leader in the Congo.

During this period, Gottlieb also enlisted a former federal narcotics agent named George White to run Operation Midnight Climax, which involved prostitutes on the CIA payroll who would lure clients, including US and foreign diplomats, back to CIA-run safehouses in New York and San Francisco. They were slipped LSD and monitored by White through a two-way mirror while he sat on a portable toilet swilling martinis. This program ran for 10 years, with a purpose to research the power of sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the use of mind-altering drugs in field operations. CIA agents would later blackmail diplomats into becoming informants.

In a letter to his former employer reflecting on his career, White is quoted as saying, “It was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all highest.”

They do not give a damn about the law or the Constitution or the Congress or the Oversight committees except as something to be subverted and manipulated and lied to. They ruin their detractors and they fear the truth. If they can, they will blackmail you. Sex, drugs, deals, whatever it takes.“
— Former CIA officer and Iran-Contra whistleblower Bruce Hemmings

1950s—1980s | CIA’s Secret Drug War in Southeast Asia and the Golden Triangle

The roots of Southeast Asia’s billion-dollar drug trade were concentrated in the Golden Triangle, spanning northern Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), and Laos. In the 1950s, the CIA sought to prevent the spread of Maoist communism into Burma and mainland Southeast Asia. To achieve this, the CIA supported exiled Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang) troops, providing American military weapons, logistical support, and transportation assistance through a CIA-owned airline later known as Air America.

A declassified CIA cable stated that the Kuomintang troops who settled in Mae Salong, Thailand became the “dominant opium traffickers in the region,” and that their relocation proved a “boon” to their trafficking operations by enabling cross-border networks in Thailand. Throughout the Vietnam War and the CIA’s secret war in Laos, Air America flew arms and supplies into the region, including flying opium for Laotian drug lords up to 1971.

25-year DEA veteran Michael Levine headed a unit investigating major drug operations beginning in the 70s. He discovered that the CIA and State Department were sabotaging cases getting to the bottom of the massive amounts of drugs flowing into the US. He alleges that the CIA obstructed his efforts to destroy a heroin factory in Thailand responsible for smuggling massive amounts of heroin into the US within the bodies and body bags of soldiers killed in Vietnam.

In the 80s, highly decorated Army Special Forces officer James “Bo” Gritz was sent on missions in Southeast Asia to search for American POWs left behind after the Vietnam War. What he discovered was that the CIA and State Department were operating a large scale drug trafficking network in Southeast Asia and all over the world. He would conduct an interview with Burmese drug warlord Kuhn Sa, who told Gritz that his biggest and best customers were high-level US government officials. He documents all of his revelations in his book, Called To Serve.

“In my 30­ year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.
— Dennis Dayle, former chief of an elite DEA enforcement unit

1980s | Iran-Contra and the Flood of Crack Cocaine in the US

Journalist Gary Webb’s ‘Dark Alliance’ series in 1996 linked the tragic crack cocaine epidemic ravaging California’s black communities to the Contras, a Latin American guerrilla army supported by the CIA. The Contras were armed and funded by the US in an attempt to overthrow Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government, which was seen as a threat to American capitalism.

Mainstream newspapers largely ignored the 1989 Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations findings that revealed how the State Department authorized funds to companies owned by narcotics traffickers under the guise of “humanitarian aid to the Contras,” even when some of these companies were already facing indictments for cocaine smuggling and money laundering (pg. 36).

At best, covert elements within the US military-intelligence complex turned a blind eye to the massive amounts of crack cocaine supplied by the Contras that flooded American streets. At worst, they directly conspired to destabilize low-income communities in the US. After all, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both took Nixon’s drug war and turned it into a sprawling system of mass incarceration that wreaked havoc on communities of color, while also profiting immensely from the drug trade.

1980s—2000s | Afghanistan: Operation Cyclone and The War on Terror

In the 1980s, the U.S. allied with opium traffickers in Afghanistan during Operation Cyclone, providing the mujahideen with training and missiles to fight the Soviet Union. By the end of Operation Cyclone, Afghanistan’s opium production had surged twenty-fold.

Despite a successful ban on opium cultivation by the Taliban in 2000, which drastically reduced production, Afghanistan again became the world’s largest source of heroin after the U.S. invasion in 2001. By the end of the war, opium production, drug addiction, and the flow of drug money had reached unprecedented levels, despite costly and ineffective anti-drug efforts. In fact, an interview with one official estimated that 40% of US aid to Afghanistan during the War on Terror had been pocketed by officials, gangsters, warlords, drug lords and insurgents.

1980s—1990s | Bolivia’s CIA-Backed “Cocaine Coup”

Levine also traced the origins of the crack epidemic in the US to the 1980 CIA-backed coup in Bolivia, where Bolivia’s democratically elected president, Lydia Taheda, was overthrown by mercenaries and military officials tied to the country’s largest cocaine trafficker.

Klaus Barbie, a former Nazi war criminal recruited and protected by the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps after WWII, became a lieutenant colonel in the Bolivian army who organized paramilitary death squads responsible for torture and disappearances. He also became the chief security adviser to drug lord Roberto Suárez and later to dictator Luis García Meza who seized power in Bolivia’s 1980 “Cocaine Coup.” When Barbie was finally captured, the US formally apologized to France for helping him flee. In other words, the US acknowledged that its own actions of protecting Barbie helped enable the conditions under which Bolivia’s narco-state emerged.

In 2008, Bolivia expelled the DEA from the country, leading to a significant drop in the production of cocaine.

1980s - Present | How the US Helped Destabilize Haiti

Born in 1804 from a successful slave revolt that terrified Western elites, Haiti has faced relentless external punishment and control ever since—first through France’s extortionary “independence debt,” then through repeated US interventions that has left Haiti completely destabilized by gangs and facing a perpetual humanitarian crisis.

Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was twice removed from office—first in a 1991 military coup that involved the CIA and again in 2004, when US forces physically placed him on a plane and sent him into exile. In the years surrounding the 1991 coup, the CIA helped create and fund a Haitian intelligence unit that later became implicated in political terror and cocaine drug trafficking. According to an Al Jazeera article, Haitian military and police officials with ties to the CIA allegedly worked with Colombian cartels, using Haiti as a transit hub for cocaine bound for the United States. A 2023 UN Office on Drugs and Crime report confirms that Haiti’s location is a major cocaine trans-shipment route, with large quantities moving through Haiti or the Dominican Republic before reaching Puerto Rico and the US.

After Aristide’s removal, the US backed a succession of unelected or weakly legitimized governments, culminating in the rise of the Haitian Bald Headed Party (PHTK), a US-supported political project that has ruled Haiti since 2011 amid widespread corruption, repression, and allegations of ties to armed groups. These groups included heavily armed paramilitary gangs led by former police and military figures, many of which were financed by political and economic elites and operated with impunity amid the collapse of state authority.

Following the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, the US supported the installation of Ariel Henry as prime minister without an election. Paramilitary groups expanded in Haiti alongside drug trafficking networks, fueled in part by the massive flow of US weapons. Reporting by The Intercept shows how US drug war and counterterrorism programs in Colombia gave rise to the assassination of Haiti’s president assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. In 2021, Colombian mercenaries with documented US training were implicated in the assassination of Haiti’s president.

Under the war on drugs, the US poured billions of dollars into Colombia to control the flow of drugs. In reality, this money:

• Armed and trained security forces accused by the UN and human rights groups of extrajudicial killings, torture, disappearances, brutal suppression of political activists, and collusion with traffickers

• Did not reduce drug production; Colombia remains the world’s top cocaine producer and even set a record for cocaine production in 2023.

2000—2012 | US Helped Rise of Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico

Since 2018, the Council on Foreign Relations estimates that over thirty thousand people have died each year due to violence from drug cartels and human rights violations committed by Mexico in its war against organized crime.

While the US pumped billions into Mexican law enforcement and military to fight organized crime, US agencies allowed the Sinaloa drug cartel to carry out its operations from 2000 to 2012 in exchange for intel on rival cartels without Mexican oversight. Court documents reveal that DEA agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, and Department of Justice prosecutors were authorized by the US to meet with drug traffickers in Mexico, offering to have charges against cartel members dropped in the US. During this period, the Sinaloa cartel’s power surged. Violence, human trafficking, and drug smuggling rose to unprecedented levels in Mexico. As the original Mexican investigation stated, the US implemented a strategy “with little concern for the loss of lives in both Mexico and the U.S., or for the ongoing drug trafficking into the U.S. or its consumption.”

The US Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces “don’t fight drug traffickers”, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told Al Jazeera, instead “they try to manage the drug trade”. “It’s like pest control companies,” Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, the Chihuahua spokesman [said]. “If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job.”
— “Mexican official: CIA ‘manages’ drug trade,” Al Jazeera

2016—2022 | Philippines Brutal War on Drugs Fueled by US Support

From 2016 to 2022, former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte oversaw a brutal “war on drugs” that resulted in an estimated 27,000 extrajudicial killings, largely targeting poor and marginalized communities. Police and vigilantes routinely executed suspected drug users without arrest or trial, often planting drugs or weapons at crime scenes to justify the killings; children were frequently killed as collateral victims and, in some cases, deliberately targeted. Detainees were also tortured and extorted for bribes. Through the creation of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), political dissidents and activists were arrested, disappeared, tortured and executed.

Within weeks of Duterte taking office in 2016, the US announced new weapons and training support for the Philippine National Police, including a $32 million package. Later that year, Obama’s administration authorized $90 million in military aid to the country and roughly $1 billion during the 8 years he was in office. Assistance continued under Trump and Biden.

In 2018 and 2024, international people’s tribunals in Brussels concluded that US funding and political support made Washington complicit in the violence. In 2026, Duterte was arrested and transferred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to face crimes against humanity charges.

2009—Present | US Ties to Honduras’ Narco-State

In 2024, Honduras’s former president Juan Orlando Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking. US Attorney General Merrick Garland made it clear that Hernández abused his power to run the country as a narco-state, giving drug traffickers free rein and leaving both Honduras and the US to suffer the consequences. Yet what wasn’t made clear to the public was Washington’s long-running complicity in his crimes. Beginning with the backing of an illegal and brutal military coup that egregiously violated human rights in 2009, the US government—under both Democratic and Republican administrations—supported Hernández for years, funneling aid to his military and police forces while turning a blind eye to his deep involvement in drug trafficking, election fraud, and human rights abuses.

The U.S. poured millions into counternarcotics aid that trained and equipped police and military forces that brutally suppressed the population. As chief of the Honduran National Police, convicted drug trafficker Juan Carlos Bonilla (“El Tigre”) oversaw TIGRES, a special unit within the National Police trained by US special forces and operating alongside Honduran officials trained at Fort Moore, Georgia (formerly known as The School of Americas) which graduated more than 500 individuals later implicated in widespread human rights abuses across Latin America including the killing, torture, and suppression of political activists. Testimony at Hernández’s trial revealed that members of MS-13 were subcontracted as early as 2004 through Juan Carlos Bonilla to provide security for caravans of cocaine alongside soldiers.

Hernández protected US interests in the region and the US propped him up as a “warrior against drugs” for years. Under Hernández’s reign, Honduras was plagued by widespread violence and instability, forcing many citizens to flee towards the US. It was only after Hernández lost power, and his ability to safeguard U.S. interests waned, that he was extradited to the U.S. and sentenced for his crimes against humanity.

Recently, the Trump administration inexplicably pardoned Hernández while at the same time using its commitment to the fight against drugs as a pretense for military action against Venezuela.

When It Comes to The War on Drugs, Who Are The Real Criminals?

“The CIA and the Department of State were protecting more and more politically powerful drug traffickers around the world. Media’s duties, as I experienced firsthand, were twofold: first, to keep quiet about the gush of drugs that was allowed to flow unimpeded into the US; second, to divert the public’s attention by shilling them into believing the drug war was legitimate by falsely presenting the few trickles we were permitted to indict as though they were major “victories,” when in fact we were doing nothing more than getting rid of the inefficient competitors of CIA assets.
— Michael Levine, 25-year veteran of the DEA, best-selling author and journalist

When it comes to the War on Drugs, who are the real criminals? Where is the real justice?

If you’re laundering billions of dollars for a drug cartel, or you’re a giant pharmaceutical company responsible for countless deaths and suffering—like when Congress and the DEA turned a blind eye to the powerful corporations operating like a drug cartel and profiting from countless opioid deaths—isn’t that a more serious crime than someone on the streets possessing cocaine?

The war on drugs is a racket that will likely create serious blowback in the coming years as the deadly drug addiction epidemic marches on, impacting millions of lives across the country.

More importantly, these issues aren’t just political. They take a toll on our humanity. Let’s work together across our differences to end this corrupt war on drugs and heal our broken communities. As long as we choose complacency over awareness, these dysfunctions in the system will continue.

We can’t shift the chaos we’re in until we name it clearly. When we can recognize what’s really pushing us—in our personal lives and as a society—we already have a degree of freedom from it. Disturbing information like this can paradoxically remind us of the greater good. It is the courage of the people and the love for the common good that bring these injustices to light—fueling uncensored dialogue and constructive action.

More Important Resources

• Explore our War on Drugs news category of all of our news summaries from reliable media sources about the real story behind the war on drugs.

• Our comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding. We’ve documented countless inspiring stories and solutions that help us move beyond fear about the addiction crisis and the war on drugs: healing our bodies, repairing our criminal justice system, and transforming the war machine.

• The Wisdom of Trauma is a powerful film that travels alongside Dr. Gabor Maté in his quest to discover the connection between illness, addiction, trauma, and society. Deeply touching and captivating in its diverse portrayal of real human stories, the film also provides a new vision of a trauma-informed society that seeks to “understand the sources from which troubling behaviors and diseases spring in the wounded human soul.” Anyone can watch this donation-optional film at the above link.

With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today’s headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who’s elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power. We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

It’s the first day of 2026, and I’m going into it dancing!

Here’s an 8-min compilation video of Amber dancing through the seasons of 2025!

Dance is one of the oldest human technologies for freedom and raising consciousness—pulling us into direct experience and awakening our capacity to feel, heal, connect, come alive.

Somatics teacher and political organizer Prentis Hemphill put it best:

“What good is freedom if we don’t feel it?”

Freedom isn’t just political or symbolic, it’s something we embody that inspires and brings out the best in us. It’s an inner reality, a way of being, a state of consciousness that fuels creative and authentic living. Watching inspirational speaker Peter Sharp dance his heart out during his TEDx Talk “Dare to be vulnerable“ is a powerful reminder that our bodies are vehicles for truth, courage, and connection. When we move from this place, freedom stops being an idea and becomes a lived experience.

“Recovering the capacity to feel [has] been a kind of thawing. I was taught that I couldn’t feel, it wasn’t time to feel, it was inappropriate or dangerous to feel, or honestly impossible to feel everything that I might feel if I opened myself up to it. It’s been a journey of getting curious about myself … I feel my freest when I can be present.” — Prentis Hemphill

A society that can self-regulate, self-heal, and access deeper layers of perception is harder to manipulate through division and fear.

• The dancefloor helped fuel the civil rights movement, offering a rare integrated space where people of all skin colors could mingle, speak, and sing freely. As DJ Honey Dijon once said, “Dancefloors do what governments can’t – bringing people together from all walks of life.”

• Research shows that dance is a top driver of neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to rewire, heal, and grow through experience. A 2024 British Medical Journal meta-analysis found that dance reduces depression more than walking, yoga, and even antidepressants.

• Dance classes are now part of a growing healthcare revolution adopted in 30+ countries: social prescribing. Instead of being asked “What’s wrong with you?” doctors ask: “What matters to you?“ and prescribe dance classes, nature walks, singing classes, art workshops, skill-building classes, grief groups, travel groups, cooking classes, vouchers to the farmer’s market, volunteer and community service groups, and more. Studies show that social and green prescriptions reduce doctor visits, the need for medication, chronic pain, addiction, and loneliness, and improve mental health, memory, and life satisfaction.

Connecting Dance to the State of Our World

I’ve been feeling quite groundless with my work, my purpose, the “next step,” the future of humanity. As Tibetan Buddhist Pema Chödrön reminds us, most of the “ground” we grasp for is mental: stories shaped by fear and scarcity and built to protect us from change, uncertainty, and vulnerability. Yet the heart of reality itself is uncertain, impermanent, paradoxical, fluid.

Our political and cultural divisions safeguard our need for certainty, hijacking our emotions and preventing us from understanding nuance, complexity, and the common ground running deeper than our divisions.

“For us to transform as a society … we have to allow for the incompleteness of any of our truths and a real forgiveness for the complexity of human beings.” — Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams

When I dance, my body reminds me of the only real ground there is: the physical, somatic world. Mama Earth hasn’t gone anywhere.

Dance is this rhythmic, playful conversation between my feet and her ground.

Paradoxically, I only find flow when I relax my mind. The less I push, force, or try to control, the more my body can float, glide, and intuitively know the next step.

Our breath, our movement, our connection to Earth guide us into relaxation, the foundation of clear thinking. From that place, our embodied presence can help others think in new ways, imagine new possibilities, and regulate the hijacked nervous system of the collective.

I hope this post inspires you to get up and move that body of yours!

With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info

The most important gift this season is the creative genius in you.

Mythologist and storyteller Micheal Meade said these challenging times aren’t calling for revolution or evolution, but re-creation.

Revolution overthrows what exists yet often replaces one form of domination with another. Evolution is the long arc of becoming yet why wait for change to unfold when we have gifts to give - right here, right now?

Re-creation brings the world back to life through imagination, meaning, and soul.
How do we keep re-creating the presence of love and possibility in the world?

Modern culture tells us we are the product of our genes, family, social class, environment, education, our trauma - and that we are simply the result of all of these influences.

Older wisdom tells a different story: each of us arrives gifted with an inborn genius, aimed toward a calling. These gifts aren’t inherited or even connected to your family origins but carry their own essence and soul purpose.

Our gifts are ANCIENT in the sense that they arise from timeless human patterns: archetypes, instincts, capacities that have existed for as long as humans have told stories, made art, healed one another, and faced the unknown.

But they are also ORIGINAL, because those ancient capacities have never before been expressed through your specific life, body, unique style, and historical moment.

Our gifts and genius are often revealed during moment of trouble, turning points, crossroads, and other self-defining moments that shape who we become.

What has your life been preparing you for?
What are you meant to bring into this hungry world?

The most important gift this season is the creative genius in you.

Tune into the whole podcast:

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today’s headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who’s elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power.

We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

Stories, not facts, are what holds a culture together. Sometimes, we need a meaningful and powerful story more than food in order to live. As we enter this new year, we thought we’d call in the wisdom of Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen and her collection of profoundly touching, true stories from her time as a physician, professor, therapist, and long-term survivor of chronic illness.

One of the core pioneers of integrative medicine and relationship-centered care, Dr. Remen has spent decades counseling people at the end of life and those living with cancer. Her countless discoveries in this work have led her to see life as a powerful mystery, abundant with qualities and capacities that science and technology cannot measure. Her creation of The Healer’s Art curriculum for medical students is now taught in more than half of American Medical schools and medical schools in 7 countries abroad.

Living well, she suggests, is not about eradicating our wounds and weaknesses but understanding how they complete our identity and equip us to help others:

I think that we all feel that we’re not enough to make a difference; that we need to be more, somehow, either wealthier or more educated or different than the people we are. People ask: how can I make a difference when I’m so wounded and feel so not-enough? I tell them that it’s our very wounds that enable us to make a difference. We are the right people, just as we are. And to just wonder about that a little, what if we were exactly what’s needed? What then? How would I live if I was exactly what’s needed for whatever I am stepping into? I have no answers, but I have a lot of questions, and those questions have helped me to live, better than any answers I might find.

Below are three beautiful (and true) stories from her book, Kitchen Table Wisdom. We hope you enjoy and find deeper meaning in your own life through these stories.

With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info

Special note: Read Dr. Remen’s powerful speech on recovering the sacred in medicine, a clear-eyed reflection on the wounds of the modern healthcare system and what it has lost in its pursuit of fixing disease.

Remembering

What we do to survive is often different from what we may need to do in order to live. My work as a cancer therapist often means helping people to recognize this difference, to get off the treadmill of survival, and to refocus their lives. Of the many people who have confronted this issue, one of the most dramatic was an Asian woman of remarkable beauty and style. Through our work together I realized that some things which can never be fixed can still heal.

She was about to begin a year of chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, but this is not what she talked about in our first meeting. She began our work together by telling me she was a “bad” person, hard, uncaring, selfish, and unloving. She delivered this self-indictment with enormous poise and certainty. I watched the light play across her perfect skin and the polish of her long black hair and thought privately that I did not believe her. The people I had known who were truly selfish were rarely aware of it—they simply put themselves first without doubt or hesitation.

In a voice filled with shame, Ana began to tell me that she had no heart, and that her phenomenal success in business was a direct result of this ruthlessness. Most important, she felt that it was not possible for her to become well, as she had earned her cancer through her behavior. She questioned why she had come seeking help. There was a silence in which we took each other’s measure. “Why not start from the beginning?” I said.

It took her more than eight months to tell her story. She had not been born here. She had come to this country at ten, as an orphan. She had been adopted by a good family, a family that knew little about her past. With their support she had built a life for herself.

In a voice I could barely hear, she began to speak of her experiences as a child in Vietnam during the war. She began with the death of her parents. She had been four years old the morning the Cong had come, small enough to hide in the wooden box that held the rice in the kitchen. The soldiers had not looked there after they had killed the others. When at last they had gone and she ventured from hiding she had seen that her family had been beheaded. That was the beginning. I was horrified. She continued on. It had been a time of brutality, a world without mercy. She was alone. She had starved. She had been brutalized. Hesitantly at first, and then with growing openness, she told story after story. She had become one of a pack of homeless children. She had stolen, she had betrayed, she had hated, she had helped kill. She had seen things beyond human endurance, done things beyond imagination. Like a spore, she had become what was needed to survive.

As the weeks went by, there was little I could say. Over and over she would tell me that she was a bad person, “a person of darkness.” I was filled with horror and pity, wishing to ease her anguish, to offer comfort.

Over and over a wall of silence and despair threatened to close us off from each other. Over and over I would beat it back, insisting that she tell me the worst. She would weep and say, “I do not know if I can,” and hoping that I would be able to hear it, I would tell her that she must. And she would begin another story. I often found myself not knowing how to respond, unable to do anything but stand with her here, one foot in this peaceful calm office on the water, the other in a world beyond imagination. I had never been orphaned, never been hunted, never missed a meal except by choice, never violently attacked another person. But I could recognize the whisper of my darkness in hers and I stood in that place in myself to listen to her, to try to understand. I wanted to jump in, I wanted to soothe, I wanted to make sense, yet none of this was possible. Once, in despair myself, I remember thinking, “I am her first witness.”

Over and over she would cry out, “I have such darkness in me.” At such times it seemed to me that the cancer was actually helping her make sense of her life; offering the relief of a feared but long-awaited punishment.

At the close of one of her stories, I was overwhelmed by the fact that she had actually managed to live with such memories. I told her this and added, “I am in awe.” We sat looking at each other. “It helps me that you say that. I feel less alone.” I nodded and we sat in silence. I was in awe of this woman and her ability to survive. In all the years of working with people with cancer, I had never met anyone like her. I ached for her. Like an animal in a trap that gnaws off its own leg, she had survived but only at a terrible cost.

Gradually she began to shorten the time frame of her stories, to talk of more recent events: her ruthless business practices, how she used others, always serving her own self-interest.

She began to talk about her contempt, her anger, her unkindness, her distrust of people, and her competitiveness. It seemed to me that she was completely alone. “Nothing has really changed,” I thought. Her whole life was still organized around her survival.

Once, at the close of a particularly painful session, I found myself reviewing my own day, noticing how much of the time I was focused on surviving and not on living. I wondered if I too had become caught in survival. How much had I put off living today in order to do or say what was expedient? To get what I thought I needed. Could survival become a habit? Was it possible to live so defensively that you never got to live at all?

“You have survived, Ana,” I blurted out. “Surely you can stop now.” She looked at me, puzzled. But I had nothing further to say. One day, she walked in and said, “I have no more stories to tell.”

“Is it a relief?” I asked her. To my surprise she answered, “No, it feels empty.”

“Tell me.” She looked away. “I am afraid I will not know how to survive now.” Then she laughed. “But could never forget,” she said.

A few weeks after this she brought in a dream, one of the first she could remember. In the dream, she had been looking in a mirror, seeing herself reflected there to the waist. It seemed to her that she could see through her clothes, through her shin, through to the very depths of her being. She saw that she was filled with darkness and felt a familiar shame, as intense as that she had felt on the first day she had come to my office. Yet the could not look away. Then it seemed to her as if she were moving, as if she had passed through into the mirror, into her own image, and was moving deeper and deeper into her darkness. She went forward blindly for a long time. Then, just as she was certain that there was no end, no bottom, that surely this would go on and on, she seemed to see a tiny spot far ahead. As she moved closer to it, she was able to recognize what it was. It was a rose. A single, perfect rosebud on a long stem.

For the first time in eight months she began to cry softly, without pain. “It’s very beautiful,” she told me. “I can see it very clearly, the stem with its leaves and its thorns. It is just beginning to open. And its color is indescribable: the softest, most tender, most exquisite shade of pink.”

I asked her what this dream meant to her and she began to sob. “It’s mine,” she said. “It is still there. All this time it is still there. It has waited for me to come back for it.”

The rose is one of the oldest archetypical symbols for the heart, It appears in both the Christian and the Hindu traditions and in many fairy tales. It presented itself now to Ana even though she had never read these fairy tales or heard of these traditions. For most of her life, she had held her darkness close to her, had used it as her protection, had even defined herself through it. Now, finally, she had been able to remember. There was a part she had hidden even from herself. A part she had kept safe. A part that had not been touched.

Even more than our experiences, our beliefs become our prisons. But we carry our healing with us even into the darkest of our inner places.

A Course in Miracles says, “When I have forgiven myself and remembered who I am, I will bless everyone and everything I see.” The way to freedom often lies through the open heart.

The Holy Shadow

There is a Sufi story about a man who is so good that the angels ask God to give him the gift of miracles. God wisely tells them to ask him if that is what he would wish.

So the angels visit this good man and offer him first the gift of healing by hands, then the gift of conversion of souls, and lastly the gift of virtue. He refuses them all. They insist that he choose a gift or they will choose one for him. “Very well,” he replies. “I ask that I may do a great deal of good without ever knowing it.” The story ends this way:

The angels were perplexed. They took counsel and resolved upon the following plan: Every time the saint’s shadow fell behind him it would have the power to cure disease, soothe pain, and comfort sorrow. As he walked, behind him his shadow made arid paths green, caused withered plants to bloom, gave clear water to dried-up brooks, fresh color to pale children, and joy to unhappy men and women. The saint simply went about his daily life diffusing virtue as the stars diffuse light, without ever being aware of it. The people respecting his humility followed him silently, never speaking to him about his miracles. Soon they even forgot his name and called him “the Holy Shadow.”

It is comforting to think that we may be of help in ways that we don’t even realize. One of my own personal healers is probably completely unaware of the difference she made in my life. In fact, I do not know even her name and I am sure she has long forgotten mine.

At twenty-nine, much of my intestine was removed surgically and I was left with an ileostomy. A loop of bowel opens on my abdomen and an ingeniously designed plastic appliance, which I remove and replace every few days, covers it. Not an easy thing for a young woman to live with. While this surgery had given me back much of my vitality, the appliance and the profound change in my body made me feel hopelessly different, permanently shut out of the world of femininity and elegance.

At the beginning, before I could change my appliance myself, it was changed for me by nurse specialists called enterostomal therapists. These white-coated professionals would enter my hospital room, put on an apron, a mask and gloves and then remove and replace my appliance. The task completed, they would strip off all this protective clothing. Then they would carefully wash their hands. This elaborate ritual made things harder for me. I felt shamed.

One day a woman about my age came to do this task. It was late in the day and she was not dressed in a white coat, but in a silk dress, heels, and stockings. In a friendly way she asked if I was ready to have my appliance changed. When I nodded, she pulled back the covers, produced a new appliance, and in the most simple and natural way imaginable removed my old one and replaced it, without putting on gloves. I remember watching her hands. She had washed them carefully before she touched me. They were soft and gentle and beautifully cared for. She was wearing a pale pink nail polish and her rings were gold.

I doubt that she ever knew what her willingness to touch me in such a natural way meant to me. In ten minutes she not only tended my body, but healed my wounds and gave me hope. What is most professional is not always what is most healing.

In the past few years a great deal of attention has been paid to angels and many people have become more aware of the possibility that insight and guidance may be offered at surprising times and in surprising ways. Books have been written about meetings with such celestial messengers and the help and healing they have offered.

What is not so commonly recognized is that it is not only angels that carry divine messages of healing and guidance; any one of us may be used in this same way. We are messengers for each other. The difference between us and the folks with the wings is that we often carry these messages without knowing. Like the Holy Shadow.

It has been my experience and the experience of many other therapists that when I am facing a difficult personal issue or a painful decision or am struggling with some recalcitrant and stubborn part of my self, a very peculiar thing will happen. Many of my clients will spontaneously bring in the same issue.

Completely unaware of the personal importance of the issue to me, they will work on some aspect of it as it pertains to them, all the while offering me, through their own work, guidance and perspective on the issue for my healing. Sometimes they work on the very issue or sometimes in the process of working on something else they will offer a single sentence or thought that cuts through my confusion and frees me.

I have many examples of this, but one stands out in my mind. It was a time when I discovered that a friend had incorporated some of my ideas and exercises into her best-selling book without acknowledging where she had learned them. I felt hurt and betrayed by this until my third client of the day sat down and pleasantly remarked, “You know, you can get a lot of good done in this world if you don’t care who gets the credit.” Astonished, I asked her what had made her think of this. “Oh,” she said, “it was on the bumper sticker of the car that just pulled out of my parking spot.”

Perhaps the world is one big healing community and we are a healers of each other. Perhaps we are all angels. And we do not know.

The Meeting Place

The places where we are genuinely met and heard have great importance to us. Being in them may remind us of our strength and our value in ways that many other places we may pass through do not.

My medical partner, who had never been ill a day in his life, died suddenly of a massive heart attack at fifty-six. He was a consummate healer and a magnificent friend and he left both his colleagues and his patients bereft. For weeks we numbly went through papers and made referrals for the many people who called in, many of them weeping. Finally, the last details were attended to and we settled down to a future without Hal.

Then the patients started coming. For almost a year afterwards, several times a week I would open the door of my office and find one of Hal’s patients sitting in the common waiting room. At first I would worry that they didn’t know about Hal and would have to tell them, but they all knew. They had just come to the place where they had experienced his listening, his special way of seeing and valuing them, just to sit there for a bit, perhaps to think about difficult decisions which currently faced them. Many patients came. It was terribly, terribly moving. It made me angry with Hal for tending every life so impeccably except his own.

Another colleague, who is the head of the department of family medicine at one of the East Coast’s outstanding medical schools, tells a story about one of Hal’s patients. The patient was a homeless woman whose possessions fit into two shopping carts. Once a month she would bring these up the steep hill to his clinic by lashing them alternately to the parking meters with a belt. First she would tie one, then wheel the other to the next meter uphill, tie it, go back for the first one, untie it, and wheel it to the meter above the second until both she and the two carts were at the clinic’s front door. He saw her once a month on a Wednesday. Her speech was sometimes rambling and her clothing was filthy and eccentric. This deeply kind and respectful man was not troubled by this. With his usual grave courtesy he welcomed her into his consulting room, listened to the details of her difficult life, and did what he could to ease her burden.

After he had been seeing her for some time, he became aware that she sometimes came to the hospital on days when he was not there. The clinic nurses were puzzled by this at first, as she seemed to know in some mysterious way that it was not her day to see the doctor. After talking with her, they determined that she simply wanted to go to his consulting room. Once there she would stand on the threshold and slowly and deliberately place her right foot inside the empty room and then withdraw it again and again. After a while she would be satisfied and go away again.

The places in which we are seen and heard are holy places. They remind us of our value as human beings. They give us the strength to go on. Eventually they may even help us to transform our pain into wisdom.

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today’s headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who’s elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power.

We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

About a month ago, I spoke at a local event in Minneapolis with Children’s Health Defense Minnesota. I made sure to record the event because I wanted our readers to be able to tune in!

With engaging visuals and slides throughout the presentation, I draw on my work with WantToKnow.info, restorative justice, and media literacy to explore the deepest challenges facing our media and public health systems today.

In the talk, I present practical, empowering tools for navigating the media landscape along with real world solutions that move beyond disease-care and remind us of what’s possible. Using social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s three forces of a healthy society, I explore how special interests have hijacked these forces:

Social capital: Social capital is the values and practices that bind us in relationship and make it possible for us to solve problems together especially in times of crisis. Yet cancel culture, social division, and self-censorship are weakening that foundation. Essentially, the crisis we face today in public health isn’t just medical or environmental, it’s a social and moral crisis. Our health epidemics are getting worse not because we lack solutions, but because our attention is constantly being redirected toward fear-based narratives that fuel the endless culture wars.

Strong institutions: Giant corporations control our food, our medicine, our agricultural and health systems. They instrumentalize government agencies to support policies and products that cause widespread harm, including the toxic chemicals damaging our brains, our bodies, and our capacity to thrive. I discuss how our scientific and medical institutions have become increasingly captured by corporate and special interests, rooted in Rockefeller’s Big Oil influence that helped lay the foundation for modern pharmaceutical medicine and continuing through today’s revolving doors and high-level health cover-ups.

Shared stories: Covert censorship networks, fact-checking organizations, credibility scoring tools funded by powerful interests, and “bias-tracking” platforms narrowing complex issues into partisan boxes all manufacture both the illusion of consensus and the illusion of division. I unpack the machinery behind the censorship during the COVID pandemic era and connect it to a much deeper story about who shapes our information environment and what we see and don’t see.

I hope this presentation supports your sensemaking during these challenging times, PEERS community! It would mean so much to me if you could watch it and let me know what you think!

With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info

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WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today’s headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who’s elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power.

We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

One day, two policemen were driving up that road when, just beyond the railing, they saw a young man about to jump. One of the policemen bolted from the car and grabbed the fellow just as he was stepping off the ledge. His momentum threatened to carry both of them over the cliff, but the policeman refused to let go. Somehow he held on long enough for his partner to arrive and pull the two of them to safety. When a newspaper reporter asked, “Why didn’t you let go? You would have been killed,” he answered: “I couldn’t... I couldn’t let go. If I had, I couldn’t have lived another day of my life.”

[German philosopher Arthur] Schopenhauer’s answer ... represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical reality, which is that you and the other are two aspects of one life, and your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is our identity and unity with all life. As the writer Alberto Rios once put it, “I am in your family tree and you are in mine.” Our connection to others goes to the core of life’s mystery. The religion of inequality — of money and power — has failed us; its gods are false gods. There is something more essential — more profound — in the American experience than the hyena’s appetite. Once we recognize and nurture this, once we honor it, we can reboot democracy and get on with the work of liberating the country we carry in our hearts.

– renowned journalist Bill Moyers, The Oligarchy vs. The People

In a world facing significant challenges, our current stories about the world are falling short. The endless culture wars, weaponized identity politics, and negative news overload reveal just how narrow our frames of reference have become.

This week’s Beyond Fear series spotlights three compelling lines of evidence that radically expand our perception about who we are as humans:

• what organ transplants reveal about the mysteries of human consciousness
• inside the fascinating scientific investigations into past-life memories in children
• a declassified CIA program that analyzed a successful method for unlocking the power to radically expand our minds, heal ourselves, and create the conditions for societal transformation

These things are fascinating all on their own. But together, they invite us to consider a profound reimagining: Who are we? Why are we here? What are we truly capable of?

What Organ Transplants Reveal About the Mysteries of Human Consciousness

Across hospitals and peer-reviewed case reports, a consistent pattern has emerged where organ recipients end up with memories, preferences, emotions, and skills that previously belonged to their donors. Neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall’s interviews with 73 heart transplant recipients, 67 other organ recipients, and families of 18 deceased donors revealed fascinating recurring themes: abrupt shifts in food cravings, musical interests, personality traits, and the surprising emergence of skills that perfectly matched their unknown donors. Some recipients described vivid dreams or bodily sensations that revealed details about the donor’s life and death, later verified by families and medical records.

Here were some of Dr. Pearsall’s most extraordinary cases as summarized in the widely-read medical Substack, The Forgotten Side of Medicine:

The Murder Conviction: An eight-year-old who received a murdered ten-year-old’s heart began having nightmares about the killer. Using the child’s descriptions, police found and convicted the murderer based on completely accurate details about timing, weapon, location, and the victim’s final words.
The Artist’s Heart: The Daily Mail documented William Sheridan, whose drawing skills were “stuck at nursery level” until his heart transplant. Suddenly, he could produce beautiful drawings of wildlife and landscapes. His donor had been a keen artist.
The Copacetic Connection: A physician whose husband David died in a car crash later met a transplant recipient. She whispered to him, “I love you David. Everything is copacetic.” The recipient’s mother revealed: “My son uses that word ‘copacetic’ all the time now. He never used it before he got his new heart.” This had been the couple’s special signal.
The Violin Case: A 47-year-old foundry worker received a 17-year-old Black student’s heart and developed a fascination with classical music. Initially dismissing any connection (thinking his donor would prefer rap), he later learned the donor had died clutching his violin case on the way to violin lessons.

What parts of my identity did I choose, and what chose me?

If a person can receive memories or emotions from another body, where does my identity actually live?

Children Remembering Past Lives: Indicators of Consciousness Continuity

For more than half a century, researchers at the University of Virginia have documented one of the most fascinating anomalies: thousands of young children, often between ages two and six, recalling detailed memories of lives they never lived. In over 2,500 cases collected by Dr. Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim Tucker, many children suddenly describe places they have never visited, people they have never met, and vocabulary far beyond their developmental stage. Some children spontaneously display unfamiliar skills or speak languages they were never taught, a phenomenon known as xenoglossy. In fact, the Washington Post reported that two-thirds of the database show cases where a child presents enough identifying information for relatives or researchers to pinpoint a deceased person.

In Oklahoma in 2009, 5-year-old Ryan Hammons would lie awake at night and plead: “Can I go home? Can I see my mom?” or “What happened to my children?” He was lying beside [his mother] one night, Cyndi Hammons remembers, when he said that he needed to tell her something. “I think I used to be somebody else,” he whispered. Ryan was waking up sobbing at night and describing things his mother couldn’t fathom: that he remembered living in Hollywood in a big white house with a swimming pool. That he once had three sons and a younger sister. That he drove a green car, and his wife drove a black one.

Not long after, Ryan saw a man he recognized in one of his library books, a peripheral figure in a photograph of six men: “That’s me!” he told his mother. With the help of a production crew from the A&E series “The Unexplained,” they were able to identify the man as Marty Martyn, a movie extra and talent agent who died in 1964. Cyndi and Ryan traveled to California to meet Martyn’s daughter, Marisa Martyn Rosenblatt, who was 8 when her father died. She ultimately confirmed many of Ryan’s statements about Marty Martyn. She didn’t know that her father had driven a green car, or that he had a younger sister, but it turned out both claims were accurate. Marty Martyn’s death certificate cited his age as 59, but Ryan insisted he had died at 61; census records and marriage listings ... confirmed this, as did Martyn’s daughter.

– Washington Post, “The children who remember their past lives“

Another striking case involves James Leininger, who began having violent nightmares at age 2 about a plane crash and a pilot trapped inside. He soon started describing flying a WWII fighter plane called a Corsair from a ship he called Natoma, and that a pilot named Jack Larsen had been there with him. His parents later discovered the USS Natoma Bay was a real WWII carrier and Jack Larson was a real pilot still alive. Only one pilot named James from that ship died in combat: James M. Huston Jr., whose plane was hit and went down near Iwo Jima exactly as the boy had described. James also knew technical aviation details beyond his age, drew repeated battle scenes signed “James 3,” and recognized historical details and Huston’s family members when he met them. Most importantly, James had gave historically accurate names and details before anyone in the family had identified the deceased pilot, ruling out suggestion or retroactive storytelling.

Dr. Ian Stevenson from the University of Virginia documented the case of a young girl from India named Sunita Khandelwal. At age 2, she began insisting she had lived before in Kota, a major city in Rajasthan. She said she had died at age 7 after falling from a height, repeatedly pointing to a birthmark on the right side of her head that had bled for three days after birth. When investigator H.N. Banerjee at the University of Rajasthan in Jaipur took her to Kota when she was around 5 years old, Sunita led the way to the correct neighborhood, stopped in front of a silver shop, and identified it as her father’s. The shopkeeper, Prabhu Dayal Maheshwari, confirmed that his daughter Shakuntala had died after falling from an interior balcony and suffering a fatal head wound on the same side. She was 8 (not 7) when she died, but the accident had occurred only two months after her birthday. Before she was ever taken to Kota, Sunita gave 34 detailed statements with only 2 incorrect and 3 unverified after multiple independent investigations.

If consciousness continues across lifetimes, even in ways we don’t yet fully understand, the line between “us” and “them” becomes less fixed. The wrongdoing we condemn in others may not be as distant from us as we assume. The whole idea of accountability may take on a deeper meaning.

How much of “me” is shaped by biology, and how much might come from somewhere deeper?

What if some of the things we dismiss in childhood aren’t mistakes but early signs of important capacities we’ve culturally suppressed? What extraordinary abilities might we uncover?

CIA’s Gateway Process: Consciousness as a Tool for Healing Ourselves and Influencing Reality

One of the last places you’d expect to find a guide to expanded consciousness is the CIA. Yet in 2003, the CIA declassified their fascinating scientific analysis of the Gateway Process developed by the Monroe Institute, a nonprofit known for their pioneering work on out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and deep meditative, altered, or non-ordinary states of awareness.

The 1983 CIA report on the Gateway Process frames consciousness as a form of energy that transcends the brain. The report also notes rapid results for “ordinary people,” including “impatient, results-oriented, skeptical pragmatists,” outperforming traditional meditation. This was presented not as mystical but neurological, biophysical, and measurable.

Key Human Potential Discoveries in the CIA’s Gateway Assessment

Focus Levels in the Gateway system are stepped states of consciousness reached through audio-guided brainwave training:

Focus 10: mind awake, body deeply relaxed
Focus 12: expanded awareness, beyond physical senses
Focus 15: state beyond linear time (past access)
Focus 21: perception beyond time-space (future access)

Here were the key findings:

1) Holistic insight, enhanced intuition, and problem-solving: In Focus 12, participants could project a problem into expanded awareness and receive sudden, whole-picture solutions or symbolic answers immediately or over several days beyond ordinary analytical thinking.

2) Influencing outcomes through focused intention (Patterning): Holding a desired outcome as already real in Focus 12 and projecting that intent to support measurable changes in physical reality.

3) Directed self-healing & energy balancing: Using Focus 12 awareness to retune bodily “energy flows” and apply vivid visualization of internal systems and directed energy to specific organs/regions for healing and vitality. Participants achieved states where consciousness could modulate and reduce pain, accelerate healing in the body, synchronize physiological states, and even suppress tumor growth through focused awareness, breath, sound, and visualization.

4) Releasing internal “blockages”: Progress depends on dissolving anxieties, stresses, and “energy blockages” that disrupt clarity and expanded awareness.

5) Expanded self-understanding & clearer perception: Emphasis on cultivating “full self-knowledge” to reduce distortion and improve objectivity in altered states.

6) New relationship to time & reality (Focus 15 & 21): Advanced states involve accessing representations of past (Focus 15) and future (Focus 21), reshaping perception of time and personal history.

7) Consciousness beyond the body: With sufficient training and synchronization, perception can occur independent of the physical body (out-of-body awareness).

8) Shared intention in altered states: Groups in Focus 12 can “unite their altered consciousness” and resonate to reinforce perception and aims.

The Gateway report revealed a simple truth:
self-awareness → nervous system regulation → clearer perception → greater agency

It’s telling that this remained classified for decades. Back in the 90s, members of the House Armed Services Committee once said that 70% of the black budget could be declassified at no risk to national security. Yet some knowledge isn’t suppressed because it’s dangerous.

A society that can self-regulate, self-heal, and access deeper layers of perception is harder to manipulate and even harder to govern through fear.

When we don’t trust our own perception, we outsource it. We look to institutions, media, and authority figures to tell us what is true, what to fear, who to blame, and which side to take.

In practical terms, here’s how intuition and expanded states of awareness can show up in our daily life:

• We sense when information is designed to manipulate our emotions rather than support deeper insight, understanding, and sensemaking.

• When we pause, regulate, and widen our awareness, we can increasingly hold complexity without needing to fall into the trance of certainty or polarization (us vs. them, enemy-making, labels and partisan slogans, etc). We can increasingly face uncertainty and darker truths without surrendering our agency or losing sight of the good and possible.

• We stay curious long enough for new insights, solutions or creative, constructive paths to appear.

• We are increasingly able to “read the room” more effectively–sensing when tension rises, when people are shutting down, or when the energy shifts to keep dialogue open and productive. Each of us can become what’s called a “regulating presence” — people whose very energy helps regulate the hijacked nervous system of the collective. This openness has a ripple effect. It changes how we listen, how we speak, and how others feel in our presence. When we bring this state into our relationships or our activism, we can become the kind of person whose grounded energy helps others relax, think in new ways, open to goodness, and imagine new possibilities.

If the body can heal and the mind can perceive more than we’re told, what else have we underestimated about ourselves?

What would I discover about the world if I stayed open, curious, and relaxed? What would a regulated society look like?

Beyond Fear, Scarcity, and Separation

Together, these three examples reveal that human consciousness is not isolated in individual brains but part of a shared, unified field.

If we are all originating from the same source, if we are ultimately the same consciousness that works through us, then it is complete ignorance to be violent to each other. How do we transform using creativity, using the archetype of goodness, bring that into the equation of power, and learn to be nonviolent with each other? There’s a lot of mental violence going on. But the point is that the way we approach it as violence begets more violence. So, it never stops. The answer, of course, is that nonviolence has to grow from inside of us. It has to be an intuition that often happens not just once or twice during the day, but becomes a conviction, a faith that I cannot be violent to my fellow human.

– Amit Goswami, founder of Center for Quantum Activism and former professor at the University of Oregon

What might we create in our own lives and in the world when we are no longer defined by fear, scarcity, and separation?

In facing the profound implications of this information, the darkness of the world continues to lose its power over me. I continue to discover a strength to face the darkness in our world and courage to be curious about what I don’t know. When we get out of our own singular viewpoint, we’re often told we’ll be indulging in dangerous misinformation or hateful ideology. But I’ve found the exact opposite was true when I started reaching beyond the narratives I found so much certainty in. When I surrendered my certainty, I found incredible nuance and complexity, and therefore new understanding. I witnessed change, healing, and transformation in places I never thought possible.

Culture wars, identity politics, negative news overload, and all the doom-and-gloom narratives… they are all symptoms of the same problem: we’re operating inside a very small story about what it means to be human. As the great Persian lyric poet Hafiz once said, “Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.”

More fascinating, related topics from our website:

• Explore our concise summaries of news articles on near-death experiences and the nature of reality/consciousness for deeper research and discovery.

• Explore our Inspiration Center, which documents some of the best insights, resources, and thousands of inspiring news articles on solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, mysterious explorations into consciousness and spirituality, and incredible stories of human goodness and resilience.

• Check out our founder Fred Burk’s compilation of some of the most inspirational and transformational material for personal growth and transformation.

• Watch The Afterlife Investigations, a powerful documentary that presents credible, scientific evidence of life after death. This fascinating documentary is based on a five-year experiment on communicating with the dead in which dozens of scientists participated.

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today’s headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who’s elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power. We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

Jane Goodall is best known for her groundbreaking work with chimpanzees and her lifelong advocacy for animals and the environment. Yet beneath her scientific and humanitarian legacy lies something even deeper. In this piece, we explore two powerful invitations for humanity that Jane Goodall beautifully exemplified with her life’s work:

to be transformed by the mystical experience of awe and wonder
to engage across differences without enemy-making

Both speak to an evolution in consciousness beyond the illusion of separation. This separation lives not only in systems of power and wealth that exploit the world, but in the polarization and fear that shut down viewpoint diversity and turn us against one another.

Goodall embodied this shift through an activism that went beyond the reactivity and division defining modern activism, revealing that the deepest transformation begins with how we relate to one another and to life itself. This way of relating returns us to the deeper nature of reality we live in: the interdependent world that makes our very existence possible.

Transformed By The Mystical Experience of Awe and Wonder

In her memoir Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, Goodall writes about a life-changing experience in 1974 sitting in the Notre Dame cathedral of Paris and hearing an organ playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. For a moment, her mind gave way to something vast and overwhelmingly beautiful. She later described it as the closest she’d come to ecstasy, a word that comes from the Greek ekstasis: “to be or stand outside oneself.”

Years later, she would encounter that same profound experience in the forests of Gombe, Tanzania.

“Lost in awe at the beauty around me, I must have slipped into a state of heightened awareness. It is hard - impossible really - to put into words the moment of truth that suddenly came upon me then. Even the mystics are unable to describe their brief flashes of spiritual ecstasy. It seemed to me, as I struggled afterward to recall the experience, the self was utterly absent: I and the chimpanzees, the earth and trees and air, seemed to merge, to become one with the spirit power of life itself.

The air was filled with a feathered symphony, the evensong of birds. I heard new frequencies in their music and also in singing insects’ voices - notes so high and sweet I was amazed. Never had I been so intensely aware of the shape, the color of the individual leaves, the varied patterns of the veins that made each one unique.

That afternoon, it had been as though an unseen hand had drawn back a curtain and, for the briefest moment, I had seen through such a window. In a flash of “outsight” I had known timelessness and quiet ecstasy, sensed a truth of which mainstream science is merely a small fraction.

And I knew that the revelation would be with me for the rest of my life, imperfectly remembered yet always within. A source of strength on which I could draw when life seemed harsh or cruel or desperate.”

When we experience awe, the boundaries between “me” and “other” begin to dissolve. Psychologists at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center call this the “small self effect,” when our sense of self-importance surrenders to a self-transcendent state that can measurably change how we think, feel, and act.

Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt identified the phenomena of awe as encountering something so immense (physically or conceptually) that it exceeds our usual frame of reference: a profound experience in nature, a piece of music, stories of healing and transformation emerging in the most unlikely places, an idea or experience that changes what we believe is possible. Keltner and Haidt suggest that humans evolved to experience awe because it helps us take in new information and reshape how we understand the world. This mental flexibility not only allows us to adapt, learn, and survive, but it also opens us to higher human values: goodness, beauty, creativity, generosity, and gratitude.

“Awe is a lightning bolt that marks in memory those moments when the doors of perception are cleansed and we see with startling clarity what is truly important in life.”
– Psychologist David Elkins

Awe isn’t about being amazed or starry-eyed. When we bring curiosity and wonder into our activism and relationships as Goodall role-modeled for us, we are reminded that there’s more to life than our fears–especially when these fears are manipulated and exploited by a media machine driven by divisive propaganda that serves entrenched power.

How trustworthy is our certainty when it so often breeds the defensiveness and polarizing dialogue that leaves no room for nuance?

Emerging research into near-death experiences, consciousness, quantum science, and reported UFOs defying conventional understanding of physics suggest that the nature of reality is far more complex and mysterious than our existing frameworks can explain.

It might seem like a leap to connect this to today’s political turmoil dominating our screens. Yet our collective stories about today’s political conflicts—simplistic media narratives, partisan culture wars, identity politics–reveal just how narrow our frames have become. “Trust the science,” “The far-right is a threat to democracy,” “The radical left is destroying our country,” “Follow the experts,” “Fight fascism,” “Facts matter,” “My body, my choice,” “Make America Great Again.” Slogans can become a substitute for thinking deeper about what’s really driving today’s chaos. These simplified stories may be easy to digest, yet how much do we really understand about the hidden systems of corporate and political power that shape our world?

When we allow ourselves to be moved by wonder and curiosity in a world addicted to certainty and outrage, we begin shifting out of defensiveness and into a grounded openness. This openness has a ripple effect. It changes how we listen, how we speak, and how others feel in our presence. When we bring this state into our relationships or our activism, we become what psychologists call a “regulating presence,” the kind of person whose grounded energy helps others relax, think in new ways, open to goodness, and imagine new possibilities.

The Courage to Meet Difference Without Needing an Enemy

Jane Goodall’s work didn’t follow the easy path of righteous opposition that defines much of activism today. It instead unfolded by a more humbling, slower, and deeply human work of relationship.

Building relationships with people and companies on the other side was an approach that opened doors activism alone could not. She befriended James Baker, a devout hunter and former US Secretary of State, who used his diplomatic reach to open doors for her across Africa. She worked with Conoco, an oil company, to build a chimpanzee sanctuary that rescued hundreds of starving and orphaned chimpanzees.

It was Goodall that influenced the National Institutes of Health to end the use of chimpanzees in medical research.

“I lost a lot of friends because of going into the labs, sitting down and talking to the people, organizing a conference to bring in the lab people, the scientists and also the animal welfare people. There were a lot of animal rights people who refused to speak to me — they said, ‘Wow, how can you sit down with these evil people and have a cup of tea with them?’ I was totally and completely flabbergasted.”

“If you don’t talk to people, how can you expect them to change?” said Goodall. When speaking to the NIH, “I didn’t stand there and accuse them of being cruel monsters. I showed slides and some film of the Gombe chimpanzees and talked about their lives, and then showed some slides of the chimps in the small cages and said, ‘You know, it’s like putting a person in a prison like that.’ Many of the scientists said, ‘We really have never thought about this in this way’ a lot of them were actually crying. And so I think this began a different way of thinking … I’ve always believed that if you want somebody to change their mind it’s no good arguing, but you are to reach the heart.”

— Jane Goodall Champions Pragmatism For Progress In National Geographic Documentary ‘Jane Goodall: The Hope’, Forbes

Her work poses an urgent question: How can our activism become a force for healing, not just opposition and resistance?

It serves the interests of the global elite who benefit from keeping us separate and disconnected, seemingly unable to work through and heal our differences. Yet I believe that human unity and common ground are the only real paths to freedom. What transforms a violent world isn’t just more negative news and the same old talking points. It’s the relationships that break the cycle of hate, fear, and dehumanization.

Thank you, Jane Goodall, for bringing so much humanity into the world of activism. Thank you for your gifts of civility and cross-species wisdom. May the spirit world welcome you home.

If you haven’t seen it yet, take a moment to watch this extraordinary video of Jane Goodall and Wounda, one of the many chimpanzees rescued and cared for at the Jane Goodall Institute’s Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center in the Republic of Congo.

With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today’s headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who’s elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power. We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

Yesterday, I visited one of my favorite spots in the country: The Corona Arch in Moab, Utah. Above is a picture of me doing a yoga wheel backbend to mirror this incredible sandstone arch.

I see this photo as a metaphor for bridging the deep divides facing our country!

I love the profound consciousness shifts that arise from surrendering to the vast, enduring, and mysterious power of the natural world. These shifts shake up the familiar ground I stand on, humbling and reorienting me toward larger truths beyond my own story.

Existential-humanistic psychologist Kirk Schneider put it best:

The capacity for profound, intimate experience is in jeopardy. [Social media] is replacing face-to-face friendships and corporations are manipulating what we see, think and feel—as well as how we vote and get our news. In short, we are losing our capacity for presence, discernment, and psychospiritual depth. We seek after the instant and neatly packaged.

Near the end of his life, psychologist Abraham Maslow came to see that our highest human need is not just self-actualization, but self-transcendence: the ability to live for something greater than ourselves. Self-transcended leaders are no longer driven by personal grievance, unresolved trauma, or the weapons of ego like retaliation, moral superiority, judgment, and enemy-making.

Instead, they ground their work in the “Ultimate Truths” that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. lived by: the transcendent truths that bring us together into a collective, shared story beyond any one ideology or “side.” In the world of nonviolent activism, these Ultimate Truths can only arise from open dialogue, listening, curiosity, humility, and a reverence for viewpoint diversity.

When we get out of our own singular viewpoint, we’re often told we’ll be indulging in dangerous misinformation or hateful ideology. But I’ve found the exact opposite was true when I started reaching beyond the social justice narratives I found so much certainty in. When I surrendered my certainty, I found incredible nuance and complexity, and therefore new understanding. I witnessed change, healing, and transformation in places I never thought possible.

Imagine a world where we go beyond media and social echo chambers designed to keep us in fear and driven by propaganda from powerful forces manipulating both sides of the aisle. A world where our collective conversations are grounded in the courage to surrender to something larger than our opinions, egos, identities, and the need to be right.

Here’s an Ultimate Truth I live by: To create the world I want, I must know myself outside the distress of oppression and fear.

What are the Ultimate Truths guiding your life, relationships, work, and activism?

Comment below!

How do we look past the speculation and entertainment to leverage all of these revelations in service to the transformation of our world?

This question took me to Contact in the Desert, a gathering of scientists, lawyers, researchers, journalists, high-level military and intelligence insiders, and everyday truth-seekers—all dedicated to getting to the bottom of the connection between non-human intelligence, ethical AI and emerging technology, consciousness, and the future of humanity.

Our latest 26-minute video, UFO Disclosure: Breakthrough Technology and Awakening Human Consciousness features my interviews with leading experts along with well-sourced, verifiable information to help you make sense of this fascinating issue.

What we explore in this 26-min video:

• Technologies That Could Transform Our World: Breakthrough energy and scientific advancements exist, which can radically reduce fossil fuel dependence and regenerate our planet. We are witnessing the deliberate suppression of a whole new class of breakthrough technologies, both human and non-human, that defy conventional physics and appear to run on energy sources that don’t burn anything, don’t emit pollution, and could fundamentally change how we power our world.

• Credible Evidence and Interviews: My interviews with leading experts, along with clips and powerful stories from whistleblowers, military officers, intelligence insiders, and legal voices bringing hidden truths to light.

• The Disclosure Act: Why passing the full 64-page UAP Disclosure Act is vital to ensuring these powerful revelations are used constructively for humanity’s future.

• The Role of Consciousness in Transformation: For decades, government agencies and corporations have secretly studied and weaponized breakthroughs in human consciousness while keeping their transformative potential from the public. This story is not just about advanced technology, it’s about awakening to a deeper story of what it means be human.

Join thousands of others in this global movement as we prepare the human family for the most transformative story of our lifetime.

This week’s Beyond Fear series spotlights a game-changing social platform that's using technology for good and bringing people together across differences. This platform has helped shape dozens of laws in Taiwan and is now being adapted in California to bridge divides and create policies that seek to truly represent the voices of the people.

Before we dive in, let's first set the context.

Divisive Media is a Business Model

A growing body of research is making it clear: our media systems are structurally designed to amplify outrage and division. Former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen testified at a Senate hearing that the company's algorithm rewarded angry and polarizing content, even pressuring political parties to post more of it or risk losing visibility, constituents, and ultimately their jobs. Leaked internal research revealed that executives chose to look the other way because it was driving higher user activity and therefore more advertising revenue and growth.

Meanwhile, everyday people agree far more than they think on many issues. Yet media, politicians, and social platforms profit from exaggerating the gap, amplifying extreme voices, and keeping us locked in an “us versus them” mindset. Psychologists Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel said it best: the deepest divide isn’t over policy. Emotions and identities fuel polarization more than the actual issues on the table.

Our anger and rage can obviously be powerful tools for awakening and calling out injustice. Yet when content engineered for emotional reaction dominates the media ecosystem, it starts to replace any real or more subtle understanding of the complex forces driving today’s chaos.

Too many Americans live in fear today. Fear of being cancelled by social media mobs. Fear of extremism. Fear of fear, itself. Stories of woe permeate today’s media messaging, seldom with nuanced reporting that puts threats in proper context. Propagandists work under the assumption that people eventually believe what they hear most often. The constant hyping of a culture of fear has rhetorically scared otherwise reasonable Americans into irrational emotions and behaviors. The repeated reporting and exaggeration of frightful crises empowers media to manage a society, or ... collaborate with other sources of manipulative power, such as mega-corporations or calculating politicians.
— "Media spread fear, Americans listen," The Hill

In today’s culture of fear, what looks like consensus is often just the byproduct of a polarized culture where many feel unsafe to speak their minds. Beneath all of this are often the unconscious ways we protect our identity, our image, our place in a group/tribe—which only turns toxic when we can no longer hold space for authenticity, nuance and different views.

Over half of Americans are self-censoring out of fear of being cancelled or alienated from their community. A Cato Institute poll found that 71% of Americans believe that political correctness has silenced important societal discussions, and 58% of Americans reported that the current political climate prevents them from sharing their political beliefs. From gender medicine research, the psychology field, social justice movements, to Middle East politics, a recent study tracking 1 million people revealed that two-thirds of us are afraid to say what we believe in public, while other studies reveal a significant decline in people's motivation to share views that are unique or controversial.

Everyone points to authoritarianism “out there" or in our current administration, but look closely. Much of the fear is coming from how we treat each other on social media, in our communities, even in our movements—where the era of cancel culture sabotages genuine dialogue and viewpoint diversity.

Then Comes vTaiwan: 'Lifting Everyone Out of Echo Chambers'

If our media environment is engineered to divide and distract, then the real breakthrough comes from creating systems that foster common ground, open dialogue, and trust in each other. Taiwan’s bold experiment, vTaiwan, shows what happens when technology is harnessed as a listening tool for the radical purpose of bringing people together across differences.

Now, California is adapting Taiwan’s groundbreaking vTaiwan model into Engaged California, a first-of-its-kind public platform where citizens, officials, and policymakers can deliberate together and find common ground.

vTaiwan was born in 2014 when students and citizens occupied the legislature to protest a secretive trade deal with China. In the aftermath, something unusual happened: the government invited help from the country’s “civic hackers,” a decentralized, leaderless collective called g0v (“gov-zero”). g0v had already been building unofficial, open-source versions of government websites to make public information more accessible and understandable.

As g0v saw it, the problem of politics was essentially one of information. They needed a way not to measure division, but construct consensus. Naturally, they thought the internet could offer a solution. But in Taiwan – like everywhere else – the internet was part of the problem. The kinds of online spaces where political debate happened were engineered for an entirely different purpose: to capture attention. And that often meant amplifying the thundering politics of division and outrage rather than the subtle complexities of compromise.
— "How Taiwan's 'civic hackers' helped find a new way to run the country," The Guardian

How vTaiwan works:

Start with a real question.
A government agency or a public petition brings up an issue that needs solving, which is explained in plain language so anyone can understand.

Crowdsource facts and information.
Before debating, citizens, experts, journalists, and civic tech volunteers gather the best available data, research, and lived experience from all sides. The aim isn’t to force agreement on what’s “true,” but to make the information landscape transparent so everyone can see the same sources even if they interpret them differently.

Invite everyone in.
People join the online discussion through Pol.is, an AI-powered platform that sorts thousands of comments in real time. You can share your own idea, or simply click “agree” or “disagree” on others. There’s no reply button, so trollling or divisive statements aren't even visible.

Pol.is lifted everyone out of their echo chambers. It gave oxygen instead to statements that found support across different groups as well as within them. Technically, the tweak was small, but politically its effect was enormous. Rather than encourage grandstanding or the trading of insults, it gamified finding consensus.
— "Crossing Divides: How a social network could save democracy from deadlock," BBC

See the big picture.
People can’t directly argue with each other, but they can add new ideas for everyone to vote on. As these ideas gather “agree” and “disagree” clicks, Pol.is maps the conversation and reveals where people agree and where viewpoints diverge.

“People compete to bring up the most nuanced statements that can win most people across," [Taiwan's first digital minister Audrey] Tang told me. "They spend far more time discovering their commonalities rather than going down a rabbit hole on a particular issue ... Invariably, within three weeks or four ... we always find a shape where most people agree on most of the statements, most of the time."
— "Crossing Divides: How a social network could save democracy from deadlock," BBC

Find the common ground.
Ideas that win support from across different viewpoints rise to the top, shifting the focus from the loudest extremes to the most widely supported solutions.

Bring people together
Citizens, experts, and officials meet (often livestreamed) to turn that common ground into specific proposals.

Make it official.
Government agencies respond, draft policy or law, and publicly share how they’ll act on it. Progress is tracked, results are shared, and the process can be repeated if needed.

By clearing away the noise and divisiveness, vTaiwan created outcomes that the government could actually act on. It has formed the core of around a dozen pieces of laws and regulations now implemented in Taiwan.
— "How Taiwan's 'civic hackers' helped find a new way to run the country," The Guardian

Imagine a world...

It’s incumbent upon us to model the humanity we want, rather than demand the humanity we expect. — business visionary and professor Dr. David E. Martin

Imagine a world where we go beyond media and social echo chambers. A world where our collective conversations are grounded in the courage to move beyond fear and surrender to something larger than our opinions, egos, identities, and the need to be right.

Imagine if we radically shifted our conversations to frame every issue or topic in ways that bring us all together and highlight our common values. A new consciousness that integrates the best of the intellect (ideas, stories, beliefs, our version of the facts) with the relational world. To relate is to get present with others, relax our fears, listen, and ask questions to deepen the conversation.

This may not always produce perfect results. Yet if enough people take the risk to relate to each other differently–to take the dehumanization out of our interactions and not see each other as enemies–we just might create new possibilities and choices we couldn’t see before.

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today's headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who's elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power. We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

In the wake of recent extreme weather events, public concerns about geoengineering and weather modification is growing. Yet instead of engaging these concerns in good faith, official narratives have branded this whole line of inquiry as a conspiracy theory, often focusing on the most extreme or speculative claims while ignoring the well-documented history of technologies that manipulate the environment.

Labeling everything “conspiracy” without engaging the actual evidence is narrative control, not journalism. The cost is a further divided and polarized country unable to make sense of this critical issue, even though it could impact the future of our planet.

Geoengineering is a code word for artificially modifying the atmosphere and environment. Take a look at the over 100 geoengineering-related patents available to view through Google Patents.

Geoengineering has been used for everything, from seeding clouds for agriculture to creating storms and floods in warfare. Now, governments, fossil fuel giants, and tech startups are actively investing in these technologies as an attempt to combat climate change without actually addressing the root causes of climate change.

More than a dozen private companies around the world are looking to profit from extreme measures to combat global warming — filling the sky with sunlight-blocking particles, brightening clouds or changing the chemistry of the oceans. The problem is that nobody knows how to control the unintended consequences. Some scientists who’ve studied and modeled the complexity of Earth’s oceans and atmosphere say any “geoengineering” scheme big enough to affect the climate could put people at risk of dramatic changes in the weather, crop failures, damage to the ozone layer, international conflict and other irreversible problems. Environmental lawyer David Bookbinder is more afraid of geoengineering than he is of climate change.
— Geoengineering’s Risks Need to Be Studied More, Bloomberg, April 2025

Below, we present credible evidence and current information showing that weather modification technologies are not only real, but that they are being secretly propagated by multiple groups with differing agendas. We present this as an informed call to join the growing number of scientists and concerned citizens who are raising the alarm about the need for a regulatory framework that ensures these technologies are not misused by any single government or private entity.

We close this investigation with a powerful reminder that game-changing solutions to heal our bodies and planet already exist—and are rooted in nature, community, and the best of human creativity. We don’t need to manipulate the climate with artificial technologies. We need to regenerate the Earth from the ground up.

The Weaponization of Weather Modification Technologies

In 1972, the New York Times reported that the US secretly seeded clouds over Vietnam and Laos to increase and control the rainfall for military purposes, adding a chemical that “produced a rain that had an acidic quality to it and it would foul up mechanical equipment.” In 1976, former Pentagon think tank researcher Lowell Ponte told NPR that the CIA and the Pentagon used cloud seeding to dry up the Cuban sugar crop in 1969 and 1970, as well as making the major supply route for North Vietnamese foot soldiers too muddy to pass.

Dr. Alan Robock, a respected climate scientist and professor at Rutgers University, played a key role in raising credible concerns about geoengineering and intelligence agency involvement. In 2011, he publicly revealed that he had been contacted by individuals identifying as CIA contractors, who asked whether it would be possible to detect if another country were secretly modifying the climate. He responded by explaining that if large amounts of material were released into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, it would be detectable — both through atmospheric monitoring and by observing the aircraft or equipment used to deploy it.

Robock, who has contributed to major studies on nuclear winter and climate intervention, raised concerns that the CIA could be exploring how to conduct such operations undetected. "I’d learned of lots of other things the CIA had done that didn’t follow the rules. I thought that wasn’t how my tax money was spent. I think this research should be out in the open and it has to be international so there won’t be any question that this technology will used for hostile purposes," Robock wrote.

In 2025, US aerospace forces can own the weather by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications. Such a capability offers the war fighter tools to shape the battlespace in ways never before possible. Weather-modification is a force multiplier with tremendous power that could be exploited across the full spectrum of war-fighting environments. From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns complete dominance of global communications and counter-space control, weather-modification offers war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary. It is clear that we cannot afford to allow an adversary to obtain an exclusive weather-modification capability.
— 1996 US Air Force research paper, “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025.” As the report disappeared from the USAF website in 2021, we downloaded a copy that is available here.

The same mindset that enabled covert weather modification for military gain also drove a parallel campaign of biological testing on unwitting civilians. In other words, environmental experimentation carried out in secrecy and far from public oversight.

In 1977, the Senate's subcommittee on health discovered that the US Army secretly conducted major bio-weapons tests on American cities and public transportation in the 1940s through the 1960s. Captured by the fear that the Soviet Union was perfecting germ warfare, American scientists worked with the Army to develop their own version of this technology and released biological pathogens into public spaces 239 times. In 1966, military researchers in New York spread Bacillus subtilis variant Niger in the subway system by dropping lightbulbs filled with bacteria onto tracks in midtown Manhattan stations.

Testing a bacteria that would mimic the dispersal of deadly biological agents like Anthrax, the Army also spread Bacillus globigii, or BG, which posed a risk to people with compromised immune systems. Hundreds of thousands of people in the larger San Francisco Bay Area were exposed to a bacterial cloud of serratia particles, which led to 11 people contracting a painful, hard-to-treat form of meningitis. A few months later, one man died. Stanford doctors even wrote these incidents up in a medical journal, as the outbreak was so unusual. There is compelling evidence that the Army’s biological warfare tests have permanently changed the microbial ecology of this region.

If the US military and intelligence agencies had both the capability and willingness to weaponize weather over 50 years ago, why would we assume those efforts have simply stopped? How would the public even know, given the lack of transparency and oversight surrounding these programs?

'Climate Intervention' is Rebranded Geoengineering—The Risks Are Still Unknown

J. Marvin Herndon, a renowned geophysicist whose groundbreaking work has been reported in the Washington Post and more, has confirmed aerial spraying of aluminum on a wide scale, which he says is threatening the health of humanity and our planet. In the 2015 abstract for one of his scientific papers, he states:

In response to an urgent call through an article in Current Science for assistance to understand the geological association of high aluminum mobility with human health in the Ganga Alluvial Plain, I describe evidence of clandestine geoengineering activity that has occurred for at least 15 years, and which has escalated sharply in the last two years. The geoengineering activity via tanker-jet aircraft emplaces a non-natural, toxic substance in the Earth's atmosphere which with rainwater liberates highly mobile aluminum.

On July 10, 2025, legal tech entrepreneur, former fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Legal Informatics, and American attorney Nicole Shanahan — former running mate of 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — released information she said was provided to her by a whistleblower. This information is detailed in a report titled “The Dark MAHA Report on Geoengineering: Who’s Behind It and How We Stop It.”

According to this report, federal grants for solar radiation management (SRM), stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), and other geoengineering technologies are still being issued. The programs haven’t stopped—they’ve just been rebranded. Geoengineering is now commonly called "climate intervention." SRM is now referred to as "solar radiation modification." SAI is now "stratospheric aerosol intervention." These semantic shifts aren't scientific; they're strategic. They’re designed to obfuscate the truth and shield these programs from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, media scrutiny, and public opposition.

The Biden-Harris administration’s mandated 2023 SRM Report outlines the federal agencies currently involved in geoengineering, climate intervention, solar radiation management (SRM), and stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). These include NOAA, NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and the Department of Energy (DOE).

One [NOAA] document that was highlighted, titled Weather Modification, published in 1979, describes nearly 100 geoengineering projects. These include hurricane manipulation, radioactive and electromagnetically enhanced fog dispersal, microwave chaff deployment, supersonic ice nucleation, and conventional cloud seeding operations. That report was released nearly 50 years ago. Since then, both the funding and the technology have expanded significantly.

The Dark MAHA Report drew attention to a 1974 hearing before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Oceans and the International Environment. This hearing revealed that weather modification experiments had been conducted across the United States since the 1960s. Testimony from Dr. Gordon MacDonald (pg. 55) discussed the use of electromagnetic frequencies to influence human brain activity.

He described the potential for global-scale manipulation of neurological states, provoking erratic behavior, disrupting cognition, and generating widespread adverse psychological effects. His testimony suggested that these emerging technologies could one day be used not only for environmental warfare but also as tools of psychological manipulation.

Elite private foundations like the Simons Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Bill Gates’ Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (FICER) are all actively funding projects. They funnel millions into academic institutions, where the work proceeds without public engagement or informed consent.

One of the most well-known patented geoengineering technologies is the StratoShield, a device designed to spray sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere via a high-altitude hose suspended by balloons — with the goal of reflecting sunlight and cooling the planet. The patent is held by Intellectual Ventures, a firm co-founded by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, with Bill Gates listed among its investors. Critics have raised ethical concerns about a scenario in which a handful of powerful actors could profit from planetary crisis by controlling access to climate-altering technology. The StratoShield is a key example of how solar radiation management is being developed not just as a scientific solution, but also as a potential commercial venture.

Beyond High-Tech Quick Fixes to Regenerate Our Planet

Author and ecological activist Charles Eisenstein argues that geoengineering is a technological distraction that fails to address the root causes of environmental collapse — including industrial agriculture, fossil fuel dependence, deforestation, and systemic exploitation of natural resources. Our environmental news section digs deeper into these underlying drivers of destruction—the very forces geoengineering attempts to treat without confronting.

By focusing on high-tech fixes, we risk reinforcing the same mindset of control and extraction that caused the crisis in the first place. Eisenstein calls for a deeper shift: not just cooling the planet artificially, but transforming the systems — like Big Oil and industrial food — that are driving ecological breakdown.

Our inspiring news sections on healing our bodies and Planet Earth remind us that we have all the solutions we need to regenerate our world and seek solutions that work with (not against) the natural intelligence of the planet.

Our inspiring news section on technology provides countless examples of how humans are harnessing this unprecedented technological revolution to serve the greater good—not exploitation, centralization of power, or environmental destruction.

Up to 40% of the world's land is now degraded by industrial and harmful farming methods, according to the UN. Instead of masking symptoms like excess carbon or pollution, these examples are addressing root causes: cleaning up toxins, rebuilding soil health, and regenerating ecosystems.

Here are just some of many real-world alternatives already making a difference that we highlight in our inspiring news archive:

• A 2023 Nature study estimates that natural regeneration of deforested tropical forests could sequester 23.4 gigatons of carbon by 2050 simply by allowing the land to recover and heal on its own without the extractive presence of industrial agriculture. Conservation scientist Matthew Fagan put it best: "A rainforest can spring up in one to three years. In five years, you can have a completely closed canopy that’s 20 feet high. I have walked in rainforests 80 feet high that are 10 to 15 years old. It just blows your mind.”

• In our other Substack, "The Pesticide Crisis Reveals The Dark Side of Science. We Have The Solutions to Regenerate," we highlight cities and countries leading the shift away from chemical-intensive agriculture. Quebec, Canada slashed insecticide use by 95% with no loss in crop yields. Sikkim, India went 100% organic, reversing pollinator decline, conserving water, and and increasing crop yields.

• Regenerative agriculture offers a proven, low-tech solution to climate change by restoring soil health and pulling carbon from the atmosphere. Practices like cover cropping, rotational grazing, and no-till farming not only boost yields but also cut pesticide use, protect groundwater, and reduce erosion. On just 10 acres in California, Solidarity Farm has tripled its soil carbon in five years—capturing the equivalent of 600 metric tons of CO₂ annually.

• A growing body of scientists, engineers, and innovators are turning to fungi, plants, and the natural world to restore our planet. Visionary biologist John Todd’s “eco-machines” use living ecosystems (bacteria, plants, fungi, and fish) to transform toxic wastewater into clean, drinkable water, all powered by sunlight. Mushrooms are effectively breaking down petrochemical pollutants, cleaning up oil spills, neutralizing radiation, tackling landfill waste, and absorbing heavy metals from contaminated soil and land.

• From hemp-powered cars and batteries, solar cells fueled by agricultural waste like manure, to boats making their own hydrogen fuel from seawater, today’s climate-friendly tech can easily be rooted in everyday materials we already have.

We don’t need to manipulate the climate with artificial technologies. We need to regenerate the Earth from the ground up.

More Geoengineering Resources from the WantToKnow.info Archives

• Explore our news article summaries on geoengineering

• The 90-min documentary "What in the World Are They Spraying" is available on our Personal Growth courses website. Although this documentary on chemtrails starts out with some very good, reliable information, the quality and reliability gradually declines in later sections. That said, the first part is well worth watching and includes numerous media news reports on the question of chemtrails. As shown in this revealing documentary, toxic amounts of barium, aluminum, and other elements have unexpectedly shown up in numerous soil and water samples around the US, where there is no known explanation other than chemtrails. This has been confirmed by many scientists. Why has the media given so little coverage to this vital health concern?

• Watch a 1952 U.S. Navy training film describing how chemical and biological warfare agents were dispersed in the air and by sea. Listen to an informative panel discussion on chemtrails and geoengineering which was held at the prestigious Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in March of 2011. And in evaluating the reality of chemtrails, remember that the military regularly used humans as guinea pigs in experiments in the decades before and after WWII. Explore a list and descriptions of these sometimes lethal experiments conducted on unknowing citizens.

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today's headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who's elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power. We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe

In President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1961 speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, he also cautioned Americans about the growing power of a "scientific, technological elite." "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment project allocations and the power of money is ever present," warned Eisenhower. The federal government had become a major financier of scientific research after World War II, and Eisenhower was worried that the spirit of open inquiry ... would be corrupted by the priorities of the federal bureaucracy. Today, many of the people protesting the Trump administration's cuts to federal funding for scientific research are part of that scientific, technological elite.
— Eisenhower Warned Us About the 'Scientific Elite,' Reason Magazine

Across the United States, a powerful legislative push is underway to protect pesticide manufacturers from being held accountable for the harms caused by their products.

Georgia and North Dakota have already passed laws shielding pesticide manufacturers, and similar industry-backed bills are moving forward in up to 21 states. Over 79 members of Congress recently signed a letter defending the pesticide industry, warning against “politically motivated attacks on sound science.”

Mainstream media and authority figures tell us to be outraged by the “attack on science,” but few are willing to face how thoroughly compromised our scientific and media institutions have become due to corporate influence at the highest levels of power. Top editors of world-renowned journals have warned that much of published scientific and medical research is distorted by fraud, corporate influence, and conflicts of interest.

For far too long, the institutions meant to protect us have turned a blind eye to the powerful forces driving environmental destruction, the corporate capture of science, and the unprecedented chronic disease crisis. The good news is that the path to healing and transformation is already here.

This brief investigation connects the dots—completing this investigation with inspiring solutions, people-powered movements, and real-world success stories that serve as powerful reminders: we already have the technology, creativity, and social will needed to begin regenerating all life on Earth.

'Parkinson’s is a man-made disease'

While oligarchs and corporations drive ecological collapse, isn’t it telling that the titans of our centralized food system are so often left out of the conversation? The pesticide issue receives nowhere near the level of outrage sparked by far less damaging issues dominating the news. Yet if you scratch beneath the surface, you’ll uncover a widespread conspiracy to poison our food, air, and water.

Bayer, the maker of the world’s most widely used weedkiller, is facing over 170,000 lawsuits in the US. Billions of pounds of pesticides are used each year on our food despite their use being identified as a cancer risk comparable to smoking. Their products are linked to environmental destruction, nervous system damage in bees, and the insect apocalpyse itself. According to the EPA, glyphosate can kill or harm 93 percent of the plants and animals protected under the Endangered Species Act.

In 2017, a UN report identified pesticides as a "global human rights concern," revealing that an average of about 200,000 people die annually from the toxic exposure of pesticides across the world. In children, exposure to pesticides increase the risk of reduced IQs, memory and attention deficits, and autism for prenatal children. Pesticides are linked to depression, cancer, brain diseases, birth defects, infertility, organ damage, and other devastating chronic diseases —making it one of the largest corporate liability issues in modern history.

The 1982 neurotoxic contaminant MPTP case was a turning point in showing how a single toxin could instantly trigger Parkinson’s by destroying a specific part of the brain. Scientists later discovered that paraquat — a widely used US pesticide banned in over 70 countries — attacks the brain in much the same way. As rates of Parkinson’s have tragically surged especially among the farming community, neurologists now say the disease is largely environmentally caused, driven by long-term exposure to chemicals like paraquat. A 2024 Politico article put it bluntly: “Parkinson’s is a man-made disease.”

Some may argue that these new laws only shield pesticide makers when their products comply with EPA standards. But how much does that really mean when the EPA has a long and well-documented history of corporate capture — from shielding polluters to facing growing criticism from scientists and whistleblowers who say the agency is failing to protect the public? Why should we trust EPA-approved products are safe when the agency permits tens of millions of pounds of paraquat to be sprayed on our food yet has banned paraquat on golf courses in 2021 due to serious public health risks?

Few people know that some of the chemicals sprayed on our food today were originally developed during World War I and II as nerve agents and poison gases designed to harm and kill humans.

Bayer, the company that acquired Monsanto and produces 40% of the world's glyphosate, grew out of IG Farben — the Nazi-linked chemical giant that helped run the concentration camp at Auschwitz where nerve gases killed hundreds of thousands of European Jews.

Despite undeniable evidence showing that toxic chemicals are impairing our brains, bodies, and our capacity to thrive, these existential warnings continue to be ignored. If this isn’t an attack on science, what is?

By shielding these companies, lawmakers risk replicating the 1986 precedent set by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Act, which granted pharmaceutical companies broad immunity even as mounting evidence shows that serious vaccine injuries have been vastly underreported and overlooked for decades.

Monsanto's Propaganda Machine

For decades, Monsanto didn’t just manufacture chemicals—it manufactured reality. Behind the PR campaigns about feeding the world was a ruthless strategy to silence critics, rewrite science, and discredit anyone who got in the way. The following key findings are drawn from The Monsanto Papers and compiled in Merchants of Poison: How Monsanto Sold the World on a Toxic Pesticide:

• Buried internal studies expose how Monsanto knew glyphosate was dangerous and cancerous as early as 1983.

• Systemic ghostwriting of scientific studies and safety reviews while colluding with prestigious universities to downplay cancer risks and make them appear independent.

• The creation of a secretive "Fusion Center” (modeled after FBI and homeland security tactics tasked with surveillance and terrorism) which monitored and targeted scientists, activists, celebrities, policymakers, and social media posts using private “watch lists."

• Coordination with lawmakers to defund the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm and intimidate cancer researchers after it classified glyphosate as a probable carcinogen.

• Collusion with 'neutral' front groups like the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) to flood media outlets with industry-approved talking points, label critics as conspiracy theorists, manipulate search results through SEO tactics, and create attack profiles on those who critically reported on the pesticide industry. “You will not get a better value for your dollar,” one Monsanto exec bragged about hiring ACHS. ACSH took hundreds of thousands from chemical giants.

• Weaponization of 'independent' experts and front groups to attack organic food, with hit pieces claiming organic food is a scam. A series of emails between Monsanto’s top medical officer Dr. Daniel Goldstein and Dr. Bruce Chassy discussed grassroots advocacy group Moms Across America, where Dr. Goldstein states: "I have been arguing for a week to beat the s*** out of them and have clearly lost," to which Dr. Chassy responds, "You can't beat up mothers, even if they are dumb mothers but you can beat up the organic industry that paid for and wrote that letter.”

• A presentation by Jay Byrne, Monsanto’s former director of corporate communications, featured a quote by Michael S. Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Computer Corporation: “Think of the internet as a weapon on the table. Either you pick it up or your competitor does — but somebody is going to get killed.”

It came out earlier this year that a company called V-Fluence, funded by USAID and the USDA, secretly tracked and profiled over 500 scientists, environmental activists, journalists, and food safety advocates—many of whom opposed genetically modified foods and pesticides. The v-Fluence dossiers included private addresses, family details, and derogatory commentary with the goal to threaten and “neutralize” critics with surveillance and reputational smears. Members of this portal included over 1,000 USDA policymakers, State Department officials, agrochemical executives, and lobbyists–all working to protect corporate agriculture interests.

Decades later, Monsanto continues to deploy a full-spectrum campaign of manipulation, intimidation, and scientific deceit to protect its profits no matter the human cost.

While the agrochemical lobby pushes for shields, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey is pushing back. His Pesticide Injury Accountability Act would protect Americans’ right to sue chemical companies for harm and prevent corporations from using federal rules as a cover for avoiding responsibility.

Time to Regenerate

Doom and gloom is never the full story. Let’s stop turning on each other and start holding the real purveyors of harm accountable. In a time of deep political division, it’s time to move beyond fear and seek narratives that heal our bodies, restore the planet, and remind us of what brings us all together:

• A peer-reviewed dietary intervention study found that eating a completely organic diet for just six days led to a dramatic 60% reduction in pesticide levels in participants’ bodies. A meta-analysis of 343 peer-reviewed studies found that organic crops contain significantly higher levels of antioxidants and nutrients. A major cohort study involving nearly 69,000 French adults found that those who consumed the most organic foods had a 25% lower overall cancer risk—including a 73% lower risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma—compared to those who rarely ate organic. According to the study, even people with lower quality diets who stuck with organic food had a reduced risk of cancer.

• The rise of urban food forests across the US are ensuring that communities belong to affordable, equitable and resilient local food systems. Communities from Los Angeles, Florida, Illinois, to suburbs in the Netherlands are growing organic vegetables and food in their own yards, sharing their resources, and transforming neighborhoods. “I can’t think of a more generous gift to give to the community than to grow delicious, naturally organic food for the direct community,” [says Crop Swap LA subscriber] Katherine Wong. “This is one of the noblest things anyone is doing today.”

• The regenerative agriculture movement is growing into a global force, uniting farmers, scientists, food justice advocates, and everyday people. Regenerative methods protect groundwater, restore soil health, capture atmospheric carbon and store it in the soil, boost biodiversity, and eliminate the need for pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Across the globe, movements are growing to reclaim food sovereignty and revive local economies. In India, world-renowned food sovereignty and environmental activist Dr. Vandana Shiva’s organization Navdanya has trained nearly a million farmers to save native seeds and reject dependency on pesticides and corporate-controlled genetically modified crops.

• A pivotal study in Quebec helped drive major policy change, leading the province to restrict neonicotinoid seed treatments (pesticides widely used in industrial agriculture). Five years after implementation, neonic use on corn and soy dropped by 95%, yet crop yields remained unaffected. In fact, more than half of Quebec’s corn and soy acreage is now grown without insecticides.

• Sikkim, India’s 100% organic state, proves a chemical-free future is possible. Since officially going organic in 2016, Sikkim has earned international acclaim. The shift reversed pollinator decline, increased crop yields like cardamom by 23%, and preserved traditional knowledge about chemical-free farming—all while conserving water and protecting future generations.

• Facing pesticide contamination in its water supply, Paris launched a bold initiative to convert upstream farms to organic. Instead of investing in costly water treatment, the city pays farmers to ditch chemicals to advance a cleaner, organic food system. “It’s better for us to have cleaner, purer watersheds,” says [deputy director general of Eau de Paris Anne-Sophie] Leclere.

• New York is leading the charge to protect pollinators and public health. The state became the first in the US to pass a landmark ban on neonicotinoid seed coatings, which kill bees and contaminate soil and water. The Birds and Bees Protection Act eliminates 80–90% of annual neonic use, signaling a major win for ecosystems and food security.

• Toxicologists, scientists, and researchers are harnessing the power of mushrooms to convert pesticides and herbicides into less toxic compounds , break down plastic, reduce radiation levels in contaminated zones like the Chernobyl Power Plant, and remove heavy metals from industrial sites.

Our Substack, Remedies to the Chronic Illness Crisis explores many other examples of how we're healing together as a society.

Our Inspiration Center highlights some of the most inspiring solutions and stories to transform the world’s most pressing problems.

When we can recognize what’s pushing us — in our personal lives and as a society — we already have a degree of freedom from it. Freeing ourselves from harmful systems starts from within, and what we do to heal our bodies and minds from toxic chemicals, toxic beliefs, and toxic ways of relating with each other. It deepens as we harmonize our choices with the natural world. Challenging information can paradoxically remind us of the greater good. It is the courage of the people and the love for the common good that brings these injustices to light—fueling open dialogue and constructive action.

Note: Want to stay updated and informed about pesticide legislation and other important health freedom movements? Moms Across America, Environmental Working Group, Organic Consumers Association, and US Right To Know are some of our favorite resources!

Contact your representatives to prevent granting liability protection to chemical companies

WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

We go beyond today's headlines to uncover the hidden forces shaping history and driving global events today, regardless of who's elected in office. Our organization serves a dual purpose: exposing verifiable information on high level corruption and cover-ups and highlighting the best of humanity with solutions and stories that remind us of our innate goodness and collective power. We have a comprehensive database of over 13+ news articles, which has been used by thousands of journalists, researchers, and everyday truth seekers since our founding.

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