The Manchurian Candidate, with William Ramsey

We are joined by Paul and Phillip Collins for a deep dive into Steven Spielberg's psy-op flop Disclosure Day. The Collins brothers have documented and analyzed the long-running 'UFO disclosure' psy-op in more detail than any other cultural engineering researchers and they describe exactly how Disclosure Day fits into that trajectory. We focus on how the film functions as an attempt at religious engineering, having been explicitly promoted as a challenge to traditional religious belief. Its globalist politics coincide with the spiritual message of boundary dissolution and its trauma-based mind control symbolism is disturbingly blatant for a film this big and this mainstream. We also spend some time on why Spielberg's boomer approach to psy-ops has lost much of its cultural power

Musician and musicologist Dr. Hans Utter joins Brett to discuss Oliver Stone’s 1991 musical biopic The Doors, a “trip movie” that is the first full-on showcase of Stone’s signature frenetic-psychedelic style which helped define the media zeitgeist of the 1990s. During the production, we reveal, Stone and his companions conducted countless New Age rituals, peyote ceremonies, and magical workings, and they expressly designed the film itself to function as a neo-shamanic ritual, imbuing its audience with his “Nietzschean” brand of countercultural spirituality via the myth of Jim Morrison. Much of our analysis focuses on Stone’s surprisingly open embrace of “the dark side of the 60s,” including the infernal symbols and ceremonies of witchcraft and Satanism. We compare Stone’s portrayal of Morrison, as the embodiment of Dionysus, with the prefabricated archetype of the rock star as the incarnation of Lucifer/Satan. The conversation also revisits Dave McGowan’s Laurel Canyon thesis regarding the military and intelligence backgrounds of the Laurel Canyon scene that created the counterculture, since Stone directly references Morrison’s elite military background in the film, but in a way that misdirects the audience from “culture conspiracy.” Brett and Hans touch on the 27 Club, the cult of the artist, and many other related topics besides. A lengthy addendum from Thomas speaks to subjects including Morrison and Stone's disturbing shared Oedipus complex, how The Doors film exemplifies Timothy Leary's idea of reprogramming the brain via psychedelic chaos, and how the movie represents a sinister turning point in Stone's filmography, marked by the start of the enigmatic Richard Rutowski's influence upon Stone.

Steven Delay returns to our Surveillance Cinema series for a discussion of Sydney Pollack's 1993 legal thriller The Firm, starring Tom Cruise. We first spend some time on Pollack's background, including his established Mossad connections and the themes of his 1975 paranoid spy thriller Three Days of the Condor, which had significant CIA involvement in its production. The Firm turns out to be largely a misdirection op, depicting a white shoe law firm as running interference for the mafia (a favorite Hollywood scapegoat) rather than for the deep state. We also talk about themes of demoralization, subversion of traditional social values, and the movie's significant Masonic/occult symbolism. This conversation was recorded in April but personal circumstances took us away from the podcast for a couple months.

After many requests for this analysis, Thomas is joined by Travis Mateer to cover Eddington, Ari Aster's 2025 neo-Western political satire and early-Covid period piece. We break down the film's portrayal of technology, social media, conspiracy theories, Covid, Wokeness, and data collection, situating its messaging within the context of the cultural transitions and inter-elite warfare of the last half decade. While many have called the film meta-political or omni-political, comments from Aster and a careful reading of Eddington reveal the clear ideological agenda of this very sophisticated psyop. To further understand Aster's worldview, we also explore Beau Is Afraid, his incredibly unpleasant 2023 epic surrealistic horror tragicomedy, which gives fascinating insights into some of the ethnic and religious roots of Hollywood's fixation on the archetype of the devouring mother. Finally, we discuss Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos' 2025 dark comedy thriller, which similarly to Eddington, is a film that pretends to take conspiratorial concerns seriously while bolstering the same old elite ideologies.

After his hyper-sus digression of Talk Radio (1988), we return to the thematic focus that defined this era of Olive Stone's career. He continues to explore the ghosts of the 1960s with Born on the Fourth of July, his 1989 anti-war drama starring Tom Cruise. We keep analyzing Stone's treatments of religion, sexuality, war, and masculinity, go over some sus production credits, and talk about how this film sets the stage for his even more extensive interaction with the counterculture psyop in 1991's The Doors.