Picture this: it’s September 1950 in San Francisco.
The fog rolls in as usual, but this time, hidden in the mist, are clouds of bacteria. Clouds deliberately released by the U.S. Navy because they want to see how a biological attack might happen on a major U.S. city.
They want to know if it would drift inland. They wonder if it could get into the water systems of San Francisco. They want to see if it would get into homes.
It does.
Within a week, eleven people are hospitalized with severe infections. One of them—Edward Nevin—dies.
Of course at the time, no one knew what had happened, and it wasn’t until decades later that the experiment was declassified and Edward’s family learned that he may have sacrificed his life in unwitting “service” to his country.
Pretty awful, huh?
Of course San Francisco wasn’t the only place.
Similar experiments took place in Florida. There, no one died (that we know of) but enough ordinary people developed coughs and respiratory problems that doctors noticed a cluster event.
And, according to plan, no one ever suspected that their own government was making them sick.
When stories like this come out, it’s really common for people to shake their heads and say, “Wow, the government sure used to do some awful stuff.”
But we make a pretty big mistake if we assume it ever stopped.
The same institutions that carried out Operation Sea-Spray were also behind:
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MK Ultra — the CIA’s program to secretly test LSD and mind control techniques on unsuspecting citizens.
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Tuskegee — where black men were denied treatment for syphilis so doctors could “study” the effects of the disease.
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Operation Northwoods — a Cold War plan to stage fake terrorist attacks on American soil in order to justify a war with Cuba.
And those are just a few of the ones that have been declassified.
I wonder what will come out 20 years from now.
That social media “fact-checks” were quietly run as psychological experiments? That so-called health mandates were really just stress tests to measure compliance? That some technology we trust and even depend on today was rolled out only to give the government unfettered access to our living rooms?
Gosh—THAT would be crazy.
Look, I don’t think it does anybody any good to raise kids who think everything is a conspiracy. That breeds fear and hopelessness. But I do think it’s our job to teach them true history—even the uncomfortable kind—so they can see patterns and recognize when those same tricks get recycled.
It’s one of the reasons we wrote The Tuttle Twins Guide to True Conspiracies.
It’s written in a way kids can understand, but it also doesn’t water down the truth. More importantly, it helps them feel empowered to do something with the knowledge they’ve gained—not just to feel helpless under the oppressive and sinister leviathan we call government.
The antidote to lies and secrecy is truth and clarity, and the antidote to control is liberty and knowledge.
All the work we do is geared toward empowering families to better understand the world around them, and the vital nature of their place in it.
In fact, we’ve just launched a Bundle Builder option on our website that allows you to pick exactly the titles your family needs—including True Conspiracies—to build discounted, curated sets of our best books.
It’s a tool you’ve been asking for, and I’m pretty stoked to finally be able to offer it!
So go ahead and Build your bundle here!
I don’t know if we will ever get the alphabet soup agencies to stop doing terrible things.
Government, by its very nature, is coercive and corruptive, and it seems like—at least for now—we are stuck with it.
But that doesn’t mean we have to be blind victims, and it certainly doesn’t mean we can’t prepare our kids for the world they’re inheriting. Parents still have more control than anyone or anything else in how their kids grow up, and the values and beliefs they adopt. We can’t afford to cede any of that responsibility to anyone else.
Because the truth is, if we don’t teach them, someone else will.
And I wouldn’t trust those “someone elses” any more than I’d trust a Tuskegee doctor with a “treatment plan.”
—Connor
