Entertainment /

‘Who’s That?’ Bill Maher Reveals to Roseanne Barr He’s Never Heard of MK-Ultra, World Economic Forum

Legendary comedienne tells the ‘Real Time’ host MK-Ultra is ‘the mind control program you’re under, Bill’

Published: December 4, 2023
  |   By Chris Karr
‘Who’s That?’ Bill Maher Reveals to Roseanne Barr He’s Never Heard of MK-Ultra, World Economic Forum

In a recent wide-ranging conversation with Roseanne Barr, Real Time host Bill Maher appears to have never heard of top-secret CIA project MK-Ultra or the World Economic Forum.


The exchange occurred during an episode of Club Random with Bill Maher, a podcast where Maher engages in relaxed conversation with guests who often have unorthodox political or ideological views.

At one point early in the podcast, Barr asks if Maher remembers getting into a fistfight with her at the Playboy Mansion.

“You’d think I would remember a thing like that,” he says.

“We were both drunk and all f---ed up,” she says. “You called me something and I called you something – you remember that?”

“I don’t, but I’m not denying it,” Maher replies.

Barr claims she punched Maher in the jaw and he hit her back.

“I didn’t hit you back,” he says.

“Yes you did!” Barr fires back. “Right in the shoulder. … You blocked it out, MK-Ultra.”

Maher laughs and says, “Who’s that?”

“That’s the mind control program you’re under, Bill,” she replies.


“Are you kidding me?” Maher goes on to say. “Do you really think I’m under a mind control—”

Barr cuts him off and says, “I do!”

Maher retorts by asking if there’s a conspiracy theory Barr doesn’t believe.

“I tell the truth!” she says. “People like you’d always laughing at me and then it comes true, and you never go, ‘Oh, I’m sorry I made fun of you, Roseanne, you was right!’”

Later in the episode, Barr compares World Economic Foundation chairman Klaus Schwab to Sergeant Schultz, a character from the 1960s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. Schultz is famous for the catchphrase "I see nothing! I hear nothing! I know nothing!”

“Sergeant Schultz is Klaus Schwab,” she says.

“In real life?” Maher asks.

“Yeah,” she says.

“But who’s Klaus Swab?” he asks.

“The head of the WEF,” Barr says.

“What’s that?” he asks.

After a brief pause, Barr says, “Google it.”


When Maher asks if that’s the bank that “controls everything,” Barr names the Bank of International Settlements in Switzerland and claims that “banks control all the wars.”

“They finance all the wars,” she says. “Their job is to stir up wars and arm both sides for profit.”

She adds: “Check it out. It’s on the internet. They make money from wars.”

Clips from the Club Random episode circulating on X likely contributed to the term MK-Ultra trending with over 2,700 mentions on the platform Monday afternoon.






According to History.com:

MK-Ultra was a top-secret CIA project in which the agency conducted hundreds of clandestine experiments—sometimes on unwitting U.S. citizens—to assess the potential use of LSD and other drugs for mind control, information gathering and psychological torture. Though Project MK-Ultra lasted from 1953 until about 1973, details of the illicit program didn’t become public until 1975, during a congressional investigation into widespread illegal CIA activities within the United States and around the world.

News of the project first broke in late-December of 1974 when Seymour Hersh published a front-page report in The New York Times titled “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.”

Investigations were subsequently conducted by the Rockefeller Commission, the Kennedy-Inouye Select Committee, and the Church Committee, which determined that MK-Ultra was responsible for the deaths of at least two U.S. citizens.

An excerpt from the book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, written by investigative journalist Tom O’Neil, published by The Intercept offers more information about the two unwitting victims of MK-Ultra:

One was a psychiatric patient who’d been injected with a synthetic mescaline derivative. The other was Frank Olson, a military-contracted scientist who’d been unwittingly dosed with LSD at a small agency gathering in the backwoods of Maryland presided over by [longtime CIA poisons expert Sidney] Gottlieb himself. Olson fell into an irreparable depression afterward, which led him to hurl himself out the window of a New York City hotel where agents had brought him for “treatment.” (Continued investigation by Olson’s son, Eric — dramatized by Errol Morris in the series “Wormwood” — strongly suggests that the CIA arranged for the agents to fake his suicide, throwing him out of the window because they feared he would blow the whistle on MKUltra and the military’s use of biological weapons in the Korean War.)

According to O’Neil, no researcher involved with the program was ever federally investigated or encountered legal repercussions.

*For corrections please email [email protected]*

Popular