Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pequnana Show,
returning for another reading, Buck Johnson aydum Buck good.
Speaker 2: I'm glad to be back for another reading. I enjoy
your series of readings in general, so I'm happy to
be a part.
Speaker 1: Of this considering I'm reading a book now that we're
just I just recorded part eight with Dark Enlightenment on
race War in high school, I figured something that can
be read in one sitting, can you know a nice break?
And this is one of those things that this is
one of those essays that, like everyone knows, a lot
of people have read Bernets. Some people have read Propaganda,
which became nineteen twenty nineteen twenty two, crystallizing public opinion
a couple of years later. But this is nineteen forty
seven and where it's after the war. That's very important
to this. And it's also the advent of TVs are
starting to pop up in people's houses and you know,
more people or getting them. So how do we handle
this going forward? When you write it, would you uh,
I know, you text me are like, holy crap.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And because it's like, wow, look at this, this
guy has all the brain child. It's like the brain
child behind how to run syops is it's what this
sounds like to me, and it's like it hits you,
My goodness. This is he's discovering the the the power
of the medium, which was television at the time, which
you know was a big thing. But now it's like
we are so far past that. Like, but this seems
like a text, an essential reading text for anyone who
runs syops, anyone who's in the quote unquote elite or
whatever you want to call, the people, the oligarchs and whatnot,
the control. It's so obvious reading this how a public
opinion is shifted. And you know, of course, unfortunately we
can use the last several years as part of seeing that,
or up until the war, the war's overseas. You know,
reading this it was almost depressing. God, he's it. I
was right. I didn't want to be right. But this
guy's explaining how it's done.
Speaker 1: Well. It reminds me of how you'll mention something like
this and people will be like, well, you know, it's
just a conspiracy theory. But it's like, okay, well, no
one has no one who's using it is going to
say they're using it. They're just going to do it
and then you see the evidence of it. You know.
It's like, you know, there's this book out there that
has let's just say it has protocols in the name
of it, and yeah, you read it and you're like, okay,
so who made that? This is made up? And everything
It's like, okay, right, everything came true. You know, it's
like I'm going through the thousand page right now, the
authoritarian personality by a Doorno and yeah, and it's like
it's like, well, you know, you can say that that's
what they you know, this group got together and they
came up, they did this study, and these are the
conclusions they came but you can't prove that they Yeah,
I can kind of prove that they implemented it because
everything they suggested was implement Yeah.
Speaker 2: So on a level, people at least our age probably
understand is this pickup artist thing. It's not like the
guys that took these courses or involved themselves in the
pickup artist community. You don't go to the girl and go,
guess what all the things I've learned and I'm going
to say to you, you just do it and it worked,
you know for some people, I know, it's a bit
of a douchey analogy, but that's the one that popped
in my mind.
Speaker 1: Well, no, that, I mean, that makes total sense. Yeah,
if you're looking, if you're looking to manipulate people, you're
not telling them you're manipulating them, although they kind of do,
now I know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Now it's right, it's right out in front of us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, so let me let me share this
up on the screen. As always, interject whenever I have
a feeling you're you're going to be interjecting pretty quickly
because I know I am this from nineteen forty seven.
It's called the Engineering of Consent by Edward Elberne's nephew
of Sigmund Freud. I believe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a relation there somewhere.
Speaker 1: And Sigmund for a relative of Sigmund Freud, also started Netflix.
Speaker 2: Oh I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there's that checks out. Yeah, there's a lot
going on here. Obviously this was written in forty seven.
There's going to be references to things that you don't exit.
The amount of newspapers and the amount of radio stations
don't exist anymore.
Speaker 2: But which is scarier now when you implement what he's talking.
Speaker 1: About because there's they're all consolidated. Yeah, so they can
be on the same page. And I'm sure everyone has
seen those videos of just how they're saying the exact
same thing. So I'm going to start stop me whenever
a right, and here we go the engineering Consent Edward Elberne,
nineteen forty seven. Freedom of speech and its democratic corollary,
a free press, have tacitly expanded our bill of rights
to include the right of persuasion. I'm going to stop
right there. This is something that our friend Rachel Tobias
talks about, says freedom of speech comes along with the
freedom to socially engineered people. Yeah, and if you don't
think that social engineers exist at this point, I don't know.
It's telling you it's all right onward. This development was
an inevitable result of the expansion of the media of
free speech and persuasion. Defined in other articles in this volume.
All these media provide open doors to the public mind.
Any of us, through these media, may influence the attitudes
and actions of our fellow citizens. The tremendous expansion of
communications in the United States has given this nation the
world's most penetrating and effective apparatus for the transmission of ideas,
isn't that's just beautiful news speaker there, Yeah, yeah, every
resident is constantly exposed to the impact of our vast
networks of communications which reach every corner of the country,
no matter how remote or isolated. So every corner of
the world.
Speaker 2: The world. That's exactly what I have written down. Yeah,
and again this is what nineteen forty seven you said. Yeah,
it's just amazing to think of these words in our
current context, and how it's just times a trillion, you know,
every corner of the world. And nowt to click of
your screen, right.
Speaker 1: People wonder how did those I got my vaccination turn
into Ukraine flags so quickly?
Speaker 2: Yes, so quickly. I just spoke with the doctor about
that on an episode that's going to drop next week.
Right now, they're in the midst there's a battle of
a young Ukrainian woman, a girl who needs a life
saving operation in North Carolina, but she's not she didn't
have her JAB. So now those people, which one's more precious,
the Ukrainian flag or their JAB loyalty? We're finding out.
Speaker 1: And I think I saw Tucker covered that a couple
of times. Yeah, words hammer continually at the eyes and
ears of America. The United States has become a small
room in which a single whisper is magnified thousands of times.
Speaker 2: Again the whole world.
Speaker 1: Now, yeah, yeah, knowledge of how to use this enormous
amplifying system becomes a matter of primary concern to those
who are interested in socially constructive action.
Speaker 2: Bingo, guess who understands this better than well, better than
a lot of people on our side. Who the enemy, Yeah,
the least knows that they do this brilliantly. Yeah, they
know this, even through NGOs, even just little protest type
organizations like I don't know, green Peace, that's not little anymore,
but just things like that. Activists, they all know these things.
And we just want to be left alone and go
to work and raise a family. And if you don't
think about these things, you're going to be the victim
of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know who covers this almost every single day?
Owen Benjamin. Mm hmmm. He talks about that paragraph everything.
I hear him in the background here downstairs. My girlfriend's
listening to him right now. This is exactly what he
talks about every single day. But just concentrate the fact
that he talks about flat earth. Yeah, don't worry, yeah, yeah,
all right. There are two main divisions of this communication
system which maintains social cohesion. On the first level, there
are the commercial media. Almost eighteen hundred daily newspapers in
the United States have a combined circulation of around forty
four million. Oh man, Now daily you can reach billions.
There are approximately ten thousand weekly newspapers, almost six thousand magazines,
approximately two thousand radio stations of various types broadcast to
the nation, sixty million receiving sets. And now everyone has
a computer, a high processing computer in their pocket. Approximately
sixteen thousan five hundred motion picture houses have a capacity
of almost ten million, five hundred thousand. A deluge of
books and pamphlets is published annually. The country is blanketed
with billboards, handbills, stowaways, and direct mail advertising. That's still
all very relevant, right there. Roundtables, panels and forums, classrooms
and legislative assemblies and public platforms, any and all media,
day after day spread the word someone's word. Those public
platforms now are called Twitter and Facebook, Google and YouTube.
And the enemy knows how to use it. And if
we don't learn how to use it, properly, they we
have no hope.
Speaker 2: And just an obvious point. I can't remember if you
and I spoke of this off are or once we
started recording, but it listed all of the news agencies
and papers and whatnot. Obviously we understand that that's the
consolidation that's going on. It's not so many anymore. I
wish we could have what is a sixty sixty sixty thousand,
sixty million. Yeah, anyway, I wish we had awesome radio stations,
but even those are controlled now by like two groups
I Love Radio or iHeartRadio, and just a few others.
Speaker 1: Yep. On the second level, there are the specialized media
and operated by the many organized groups in this country.
That's pretty much all of them now, Yes, almost all
such groups and many of their subdivisions have their own
communications systems. They disseminate ideas not only by means of
the formal written word on labor in labor papers, house organs,
special bulletins and the like, but also through lectures, meetings, discussions,
and rank and file conversations.
Speaker 2: And and CIA infiltration Operation mocking Bird. Obviously, but that's
all I kept thinking with that paragraph. Oh the CIA, Yes,
they understand this.
Speaker 1: Mhm, No, they're in church, They're in every church. And yeah,
it's ridiculous. I mean the CFR. The head of the
CFR was at Chatham House and he gave a speech
and he admitted, he's like we have we basically have
the churches now mm hmm, all right, new heading. Leadership
through communication. This web of communication, sometimes duplicating, criss crossing,
and overlapping, is a condition of fact, not theory. We
must recognize the significance of modern communication not only as
a highly organized mechanical web, but as a potent force
for social good or possible evil. We can determine whether
this network shall be employed to its greatest extent, for
extent for sound social ends.
Speaker 2: That sounds evil. I don't like that phrase.
Speaker 1: Who gets to decide whether what sound right? What sound
means for? Only by mastering the techniques of communication can
leadership be exercised fruitfully in the vast complex that is
modern democracy in the United States. In an earlier age,
in a society that was small geographically and with a
more homogeneous population, a leader was usually known to his
followers personally. There was a visual relationship between them. You
want to talk about that.
Speaker 2: Well, it's certainly true. You and I have discussed localism
and small towns and getting out of the big cities.
That's the spirit of what we're saying is manifesting in
this paragraph right here, for instance. And I know you've
spoken about this quite a bet in your show. If
you know that your sheriff and he sees your face,
and the people that you're voting for see your face,
you're accountable to them. Same at the police. You know,
we come from a political background where all cops have
to be bad, but it's not necessarily true. If you
know them and they live on your street and there's
family relations and whatnot, then you know, we understand, we
say more at this point, so smaller is better. And
you know, as things grow and grow and grow, and
we become under the control of just a handful of people,
things get worse. And then that's when the infighting comes
and multicultural issues and whatnot.
Speaker 1: When it comes down to local areas and you know,
small towns. Yeah, you you probably went to high school
with the sheriff and most of the police force, but
the overwhelming majority of police in this country are basically
tools of the regime. Yep I just want them to
be the tool of the regime that is run by
my friends.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Right, that's that's the whole point of localism, the whole
point of getting it down to as small as possible
is that you know these people they are They literally
are there to protect you if they do something wrong,
and the word and you get the word out about
it that when they go into the grocery store, they're
going to be side eyed, you know what I mean.
This is what small towns are all about. I mean,
this town I live in right now isn't really that
small population wise, but it's still one of those towns
where it's like, well, I mean, if you step out
of line and you say, you show your ass in public,
people got to know about it. Yes, And people you
know are going to know about it. People you go
to church with, Ay're going to know about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Just yesterday in the town square, I was doing
Christmas shopping and I walked in a store and one
of the ladies shopping there looked at me and said, hey, Buck,
And she knew who I was because I ran for
a city council here and then subsequently because of my podcast.
But if you see these people in random spots. You
can't be the creep, the weirdo, the guy that's pissing
people off, because the people that know you were everywhere.
Speaker 1: All right, and you know that small geographically and no
one wants to talk about their Communication was accomplished principally
by personal announcement to an audience or through a relatively
primitive printing press. Books, pamphlets, and newspapers reached a very
small literate segment of the public. I still remember in
nineteen ninety eight, like writing, like sending a fifteen dollars
check to that the IHR Institute for Historical Review, and
like getting all these pamphlets in the middle.
Speaker 2: That's so cool. Those kind of memories are cool, like
actual tangible pamphlets.
Speaker 1: Yep, yes, I learned a lot from those pamphlets. All right,
we are tired of hearing repeated to thread bear cliche
the world has grown smaller. But this so called truism
is not actually true by any means. The world has
grown both smaller and very much larger. Its physical frontiers
have been expanded. Today's leaders have become more remote physically
from the public. Yet at the same time, the public
has a much greater familiarity with these leaders through the
system of modern communication. Leaders are just as potent today
as ever, I would argue more potent because as this part,
as that last sentence explained, you can't reach out and
touch them.
Speaker 2: Yes, correct, And just think of the power Trump had
on with Twitter alone, just his phone. And I remember
in the Trump years, I actually thought this was funny.
But there was some kind of warning that was sent
out from the Federal Disaster something or other administration and
it went to everyone's phone, and I remember, Anti Trump
is going, this is not fair. Trump got into my
phone and it's telling me things. But that was a
comedic version of it. But yeah, these guys their power.
They can affect the entire world from basically an I
retire tower if they choose to.
Speaker 1: In turn, by use of this system, which has constantly
expanded as a result of technological improvement, uncle ted answers,
the chat yes leaders have been leaders have been able
to overcome the problems of geographical distance and social stratification
to reach their publics. Underlying much of this expansion, and
largely the reason for its existence in the present form,
has been widespread and enormously rapid diffusion of literacy. I
talked about this with I think Mark and I talked
about this on the episode where we talked about Graham Hancock.
Why does the whole population need to be literate so
that they can digest propaganda properly. They don't need to
be educated, They don't need they don't need to learn
the trivia method. They don't need to know how to
think for themselves, but they definitely need to know how
to read what they want you to believe. Leaders may
be the spokesman for many different points of view. They
may direct the activities of major organized groups such as industry, labor,
or units of government. They may compete with one another
in battles for public goodwill, or they may representing divisions
within larger units compete amongst themselves. Such leaders, with the
age of technicians in the field, have who have specialized
in utilizing the channels of communication, have been able to
accomplish purposefully and scientifically what we termed the engineering of
consent new title the engineering approach. This phrase quite simply
means that the use of an engineering approach that is
action based only on thorough knowledge of the situation and
on the application of scientific principles and tried practices to
the task of getting people to support ideas and programs.
Speaker 2: Yes, he's literally saying there's a science to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it probably should be. The way that should be ended,
that sentence should end, is to support ideas and programs
that they wouldn't.
Speaker 2: Normally correct, that someone wants them to that they wouldn't
normally think about.
Speaker 1: Right, any person or organization depends ultimately on public approval,
and it is therefore faced with the problem of engineering
the public's consent to a program or goal. You really,
when you look at this, there's a big difference between
somebody who believes that the government is there to take
care of them, protect them, and that's been engineered through
consent and actually believe that, and somebody who is completely
reliant upon the public or completely reliance upon the government
for everything. So you wonder nowadays, I would rather have
people consent and feel like they're consenting on their own,
but not have to rely for any kind of physical
anything from the government, whether that be you know, a check,
whether it be food, whether it be shelter, whether it
be anything. And I think that's when a lot of
this falls apart, because we know that there was engineering
of consent up to a certain point. But when you see,
like say, nineteen sixty four and nineteen sixty five, the
Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, what you
see after that is violence. You've seen violence, you saw
violence building up before it. But after those things are passed,
and it's basically, Okay, we're not only convincing you that
you know we're legitimate and everything, but now you rely
upon us forever. I mean, it seems like that's when
things start to go downhill and become and I know
I'm saying this fifty to fifty seven years on, but
it seems like that's when start going downhill and things
become unsustainable. Agreed, We expect our elected government officials to
try to engineer our consent through the network of communications
open to them for the measures they propose. We reject
the government authoritarianism or regimentation, but we are willing to
take action suggested to us by the written or spoken word.
Speaker 2: This next sentence is key, in my opinion.
Speaker 1: The engineering of consent is the very essence of the
democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest.
Speaker 2: Hm does that not just simply say democracy is bullshit?
You have to be bullshitted to play along, is what
that sounds like to me. The engineering of consent is
the very essence of the democratic process. The engineering meaning
scientifically formulating these formulating these, these means in which they
can change your opinion. Is what it takes for a
democracy to flourish.
Speaker 1: Interesting, and that only exists because of the freedom to
persuade and suggest. Don't you like freedom of speech?
Speaker 2: Book right? Exactly?
Speaker 1: Aren't you that's the first amendment?
Speaker 2: Aren't you an absolutist?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm an absolutist, But don't talk about Sandy hook Ah. Yes,
the freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly, the freedoms
which make the engineering of consent possible, are among the
most cherished guarantees of the Constitution of the United States.
Speaker 2: But it makes it possible for them to all be limited.
There's a funny irony in this.
Speaker 1: When I see this, I know maybe this is my libertarianism,
libertarianism creeping back in. All I see is we have
the freedom to just be as authoritarian as possible, and
we're just going to convince you that it's for your good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's exactly. That's another way of saying that's exactly
the point I'm trying to make. Yeah, being go it
gives them the It gives them the power to limit
your rights in the name of your rights.
Speaker 1: It's brilliant, actually, right. The engineering of consent should be
based theoretically and practically on the complete understanding of those
whom it attempts to win over. They're going to get
to know you. They're going to get to know you.
What are your once in your needs?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, now they can really do that. It's in
the power of this little computer that you and I
both carry in our pockets, with the microphone and the cameras. Oddly,
they know us way too well.
Speaker 1: Wonder about that. Sometimes some of the things I say
in private, Throw the phone in the other throw the
phone in the other room, and then you know, the
TV's listening.
Speaker 2: So mm hmm.
Speaker 1: But it is sometimes impossible to reach joint decisions based
on an understanding of facts by all the people. The
average American adult only has six years of schooling behind him.
I would say that's about right even today. Yeah, I mean,
even if he went to school for twelve years, do
you think he got twelve years of education? He had
about six years of indoctrination. With pressing crises and decisions
to be faced, a leader frequently cannot wait for the
people to arrive at even general understanding. In certain cases,
democratic leaders must play their part in leading the public
through the engineering of consent to socially constructive goals and
values all I just every war war. This role naturally
imposes upon them the obligation to use the educational processes,
as well as other available techniques, to bring about as
complete and understanding as possible. Under no circumstances should the
engineering of consent supersede or displace the functions of the
educational system, either formal or informal, in bringing about understanding
by the people as a basis for their action. The
engineering of consent often does supplement the educational process. General
educational standards were to prevail in this country and the
general level of public knowledge and understanding were raised as
a result, this approach would still retain its value. What
the fuck does that sentence mean?
Speaker 2: There's a lot in this one. The Harvard graduates are
easier to fool.
Speaker 1: I don't know, as I mean, look at who look
at who fell for COVID.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as malice said, the smarter dogs are easier to train.
I'll never forget that phrase because it's it's uh, it
was certainly true under.
Speaker 1: COVID and Belgium Malinwah. From what I've heard, they're very
easy to trend. Mm hmm. That's a remarkable friggin sentence,
and people just do not realize it. I mean, that's
why they needed people to be educated. They needed they
push education so much. It's not for your own good.
It's just not. Even in a society of a perfectionist
educational standard, equal progress would not be achieved in every field.
There would always be time lags, blind spots, and points
of weakness, and the engineering of consent would still be essential.
The engineering of consent will always be needed as an
adjunct to or a partner of the educational process. Basically,
what he's saying, this is how I interpret that sentence
is they're still not going to be smart enough, and
we need to We need they need to be told
what to do.
Speaker 2: Or at least what we think they should be doing
and what we think they should think.
Speaker 1: Right. Well, I'm trying to step into their shoes and
be the one who is like, well, I mean, I
know what's good for you mm hmm, so yeah, And unfortunately,
I've basically come to the conclusion that sometimes leaders do
actually know what's good for people. It's just a manner
of the intention that they have is their intention. Yeah,
importance of engineering consent today, it is impossible to overestimate
the importance of engineering consent. It affects almost every aspect
of our daily lives. When used for social purposes, it
is among our most valuable contributions to the efficient functioning
of modern society. The techniques can be subverted dogs, Yeah,
and that's what we have to do. Yeah, we need
our own The right needs its own propaganda.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: I remember Rachel One saying the right needs its own
false flags, and I was just yeah.
Speaker 2: Then you would start to hear the press talk about
false flags.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, remember deep state. In January of twenty seventeen,
if you were talking about the deep state, you were
just like a kooky. By the first week in February
of twenty seventeen, there were articles about why the deep
state was going to save us from Trump. Yep, okay,
all right. The techniques can be subverted. Demagogues can utilize
the techniques for anti democratic purposes which they're talking about.
Trump demagogus can utilize the techniques for anti democratic purposes,
which is much as much success as can those who
employ them for socially desirable ends. The responsible leader to
accomplish social objectives must therefore be constantly aware of the
possibilities of subversion. He must apply his energies to mastering
the operational know how of consenting engineering and to outmaneuver
his opponents in the public interest. I would go so
far as to say that we must become master propagandas
so that we can recognize what it is and where
it is and what was he say here? He must
apply his engineer energies to mastering the operational know how
of consent engineering and to outmaneuver his opponents in the
public interest. When I read that, all I see is
all I see is, well, we know what's best for
these people. We are going to lord over them, and
we have to we have to watch out for people
who are going to try to subvert that and maybe
try to give the power back to the people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we have to out maneuver those people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's who we have, That's who we have to
accuse of Russian collusion and things like that. And I'm
not you saying that I think that Trump was trying
to give us all our freedoms back, or he was
Caesar or something like that. Just using it is because
it's in his I guess. It is clear that a
leader in a democracy need not always possess the personal
qualities of Daniel Webster or Henry Clay. That's really Henry
Clay was a vile human being. It is clear that
a leader in a democracy does not always possess the
personal qualities of a Daniel Webster Henry Clay. He need
not be visible or even audible to his audiences. He
may lead indirectly simply by effectively using today's means of
making contact with the eyes and ears of those audiences.
Speaker 2: Deep state that that's literally describing what people would call
the deep state at this point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, or what you would like, the elites that
we talk about. Yeah, you know, the people, the people
who were pulling the strings of the politicians. Yeah, the
leaders of industry, the lobbyists, I mean, any I mean,
anyone who's pulling strings behind behind the scenes, even the
direct or what might be called the old fashioned method
of speaking to an audience is for the most part
once removed. For usually public speech is transmitted mechanically, transmitted
mechanically through the mass media of radio, motion pictures, and television, Internet, YouTube,
your pocket. Here he's going to talk about where basically
what he helped engineer. During World War One, the famous
Committee on Public Information or Going to by George Creole
dramatized in the public's consciousness the effectiveness of the war
of words. The Committee helped to build the morale of
our own people, to win over the neutrals, and to
disrupt the enemy will help. Yeah, yes, it helped to
win that war. But by comparison with the enormous scope
of the word warfare, of the word warfare in World
War II, the Committee on Public Information used primitive tools
to do an important job. The Office of War Information
alone probably broadcasts more words over its shortwave facilities than
the than than the during the war, than were written
by all of George Creole's staff. That was their way
of getting directly using shortwave, getting directly into the kind
of people who would be using the Internet or using
like used net or something like in the late eighties
and the nineties.
Speaker 2: And things like yep. And now all they need is
a frame around their profile picture. It's the same, the
same thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I love how he just mentions here to win
over the neutrals. Yeah, well then you had then you
had people who were against the war, who were who
were arrested and spent two and three years in jail
for telling people to dodge the draft.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, those are the people that need to be
outmaneuvered the subverters.
Speaker 1: Yeah as well. And you know with those people, because
they're doing it on the ground, I mean, how do
you how do you fight them? You can't? You have
to then you have resorts to totalitarianism, throw them in jail.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Now we have digital goolegs.
Speaker 1: Yep. As this approach came to be recognized as the
key factor in influencing public thought, thousands of experts in
many related fields came to the fore, such specialists as editors, publishers,
advertising men, heads of pressure groups andolitical groups, educators, and publicists.
During World War One and the immediate postwar years, a
new profession developed in response to the demand for trained,
skilled specialists to advise others on the technique of engineering
public consent. A profession providing Council on Public Relations.
Speaker 2: Thanks Berne. At least he's at letting us know.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean he's gonna tell us right now. The
professional viewpoint. In nineteen twenty three, I defined this profession
in my book Crystallizing Public Opinion, and in the same
year at New York University gave the first course on
the subject, Mark Crispin Miller. He was the one who
picked it up. Yeah, but they've probably gotten rid of
him since I don't even know if he's still there.
Speaker 2: I don't either. He seems to have fallen off the map.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in the almost quarter century that has elapsed. Since then,
the profession has become a recognized one in this country
and has spread to other democratic countries where free communication
and composition of ideas in the marketplace are permitted. The
marketplace of ideas, it's such a free.
Speaker 2: Market, unless your ideas are subversive.
Speaker 1: It's such a free market. It's just so perfect, is it?
The whole Who is Chomsky? You will? Is he the
one who said you will reduce the amount of debate
that can be allowed, But then you promote vigorous debate
in the limited in the limited scope of the I
sound like a retard right.
Speaker 2: Now, No, I know exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The profession has its literature, its training courses, an
increasing number of practitioners, and a growing recognition of social responsibility.
They they are really caring about whether what they're doing
hurts people or not. Now it's important stuff. In the
United States, the profession deals specifically with the problems of
relationship between a group and its public. Its chief function
is to analyze objectively and realistically the position of its
client is a be a public, and to advise as
to the necessary corrections in its clients' attitudes, towards and
approaches to that public. It is thus an instrument for
achieving adjustment. If any maladjustment in relationships exist, it must
be remembered, of course, that goodwill, the basis of lasting adjustment,
can be preserved in the long run only by those
whose actions warrant it. I would say what he said
on by here is the best who can do it
the best. But this does not prevent those who do
not deserve of goodwill from winning and holding onto it
long enough to do a lot of damage for decades.
The public relations council has a professional responsibility to push
only those ideas he can respect, and not to promote
causes or accept assignments for clients he considers antisocial. That's
us read fascist planning a campaign. Just as a civil
engineer must analyze every element of the situation before he
builds a bridge, so the engineer of consent, in order
to achieve a worthwhile social objective, must operate from a
foundation of soundly planned action. Let us assume that he
has engaged in a specific task. His plans must be
based on four prerequisites. Number one calculation of resources both
human and physical i e. The manpower, the money, and
the time available for the purpose. Part two as thorough
knowledge of the subject as possible. Three determination of objectives
subjects of possible change after research specifically what is to
be accomplished, with whom and through whom. Four research of
the public to learn why and how it acts, both
individually and as a group. Only after this preliminary groundwork
has been firmly laid is it possible to know whether
the objectives are realistically attainable. Only then can the engineer
of consent utilize his resources of manpower, money and time
and the media available strategy, organization and activities will be
geared to the realities of the situation. The task must
first be related to the budget available from manpower and mechanics.
In terms of human assets, the consent engineer has certain
talents creative, administrative, executive, and he must know what these are.
He should also have a clear knowledge of his limitations.
The human assets need to be implemented by workspace and
office equipment. All material needs to be provided by budget.
At this point, this is moot. They have the budget
to do anything anything they want above all else. Once
the budget has been established, and before a first step
is taken, the field of knowledge dealing with the subject
should be thoroughly explored. This is primarily a matter of
collecting and codifying a store of information so that it
will be available for practical, efficient use research. This preliminary
work may be tedious and exacting, but it cannot be
bypassed for. The engineer of consent should be powerfully equipped
with facts, with true, with evidence before he begins to
show himself before a.
Speaker 2: Public interestingly enough. I mean, that's what they used the
enemy class constantly. But that's very similar to what DeSantis
did with over twenty twenty to surround himself now it's
people that were subverting the popular narrative at the time.
But he did surround himself like with Jay Bodichari and
guys like this, and he sat and just as this says,
powerfully equipped with facts, with truths, with evidence, before he
begins to show himself before the public. And then yes,
there were a few weeks of locking down and whatnot.
And then he came out and said, you know what,
we've studied this, this is we're not doing it.
Speaker 1: Yep. Yeah, and he studied it well. I mean, he
was a quote off the top of his head. The
consens engineer should provide himself with the standard reference books
on public relations, publicity, public opinion, nw AER and Sons
Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals, the Editor and Public Sure
year Book, the Radio Daily, and the Congressional Directory that's
an important one, the Chicago Daily News Almanac, the World Almanac,
and of course the Telephone Book. I mean, now it's
just a completely different list. But all of this is
so condensed that it's so much easier than it was then.
And parenthetically, he says, here, the World Almanac, for example,
consists lists of many of the thousands of associations of
the United States across section of the country. These and
other volumes provide a basic library necessary to effect it
to effective planning. At this point in the preparatory work,
the engineer of consent should consider the objectives of his activity.
He should have clearly in mind at all times precisely
where he was going and what he wishes to accomplish.
He may intensify our already existing favorable attitudes. He may
induce these holding He may induce those holding favorable attitudes
to take constructive action. He may convert disbelievers. He may
disrupt certain antagonistic points of view. Yep, when you look
at this and when I think of like the engineering
of consent, you really get the idea that they've lost
the narrative. When when Biden has to give a speech
like he did in Philadelphia, m h where it's like, Okay,
we've lost thirty, maybe forty percent of the country. How
do we get them back? We threaten them. We hope
that their neighbors will shame them. We hope that you know,
they become social outcasts. And if that doesn't happen, we'll
completely deperson them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is easy to do.
Speaker 1: Now, Yep, should be defined exactly. In a Red Cross drive,
for example, a time limit in the amount of money
to be raised are set from the start. Much better
results are obtained in a relief drive when the appeal
is made for aid to the people for a specific
country or locality rather than a general area such as
Europe or Asia.
Speaker 2: It sounds so wholesome when he writes it, just like that,
and boys that use for some of the most evil
things on the planet at the moment, especially what's going
on with the outreach and funding of Ukraine.
Speaker 1: Have you noticed this that he has a costume so LENSI.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as Tucker putt it, he looks like a a
Eastern European strip club owner.
Speaker 1: He's become so identified with those clothes that he has
to wear them everywhere. Now, yeah, that's a sign of weakness.
That's a sign that things are falling apart for them,
because yeah, it has to be it. I look at it,
and I read Brene's and when you understand how to
craft propaganda, you look at then you start seeing sloppy propaganda.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: And I think that that propaganda is really sloppy. People
are like, why is he wearing that all the time.
He's not in a war zone. He's in the he's
on the freaking he's on the congressional floor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a very good point. It's so clunky and
ham fisted, like here's our war he wrote. It's like
he's in congress where they're all wearing suits, even the
war heroes.
Speaker 1: So yeah, all right, studying the public the objective must
at all times be related to the public whose consent
is to be obtained. That public is people. But what
do they know? What are their present attitude towards the
situation with which the consent engineer is concerned. What are
the impulses which govern these attitudes? What ideas are the
people ready to absorb? What are they ready to do?
Given an effective stimulant. Yeah, it's interesting. It's like you
read those questions and probing questions, and it's like, well,
what are they ready to absor What ideas are people
ready to absorb? Well, they've been so inundated with ideas
about the bug. Let's give them something halfway around the
world which has no effect on them whatsoever. That's like
some relief for them because it's in person.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, yeah, it's almost asking what are they ready
to absorb. Meaning what our job isn't to talk about
what they already accept. Our job is to push a
little bit beyond each time and get that to grow
in the direction that we want it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and people don't realize it right now, they're constructing
the next thing. Yes, and they're figuring out the way
that they're going to convince you that this has something
to do with you and you have to get behind it.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: It's like I said last night on a loudstream. If
five million people organically marched on Washington and we're like,
we're not. This Ukraine stuff ends right now? Yeah, what
are they going to do? I mean we both know
that it'll be infiltrated from the inside and they'll be
you know, they'll be FBI agents in there trying to
give people guns and stuff like that. But still and
there's hey, talk about engineering. Do they get their ideas
from bartenders, later carriers, waitresses, little orphan ane or the
editorial page of the New York Times, or podcasts.
Speaker 2: Or bartenders or churches? Let's close them down?
Speaker 1: Yep? Hey, yep? That is where is that where people
gather and feel like they can talk freely? What group
leaders or opinion molders effectively influence the thought processes of
what followers. What is the flow of ideas from whom
to whom to what extent to authority? Factual evidence, precision, reason, tradition,
and emotion play a part in the acceptance of these ideas.
The public's attitudes, assumptions, ideas, or prejudices result from definite influences.
One must try to find out what they are in
any situation in which one is working. If the engineer
of consent is to plan effectively, he must also know
the group formations with which he is to deal. For
democratic society is actually only a loose aggregate of constituent groups.
Certain individuals with common social and or professional interests form
voluntary groups. These include such great professional organisations as those
of doctors, lawyers, nurses, and the like. The trade associations,
the farm associations and labor unions, the women's clubs, the
religious clubs, and the thousands of clubs and fraternal organizations
which they basically destroyed all through the twentieth century.
Speaker 2: Yeah yes, and are now subverting the ones that they
can't destroy.
Speaker 1: Formal groups, such as political units, may range from organized
minorities to the large amorphous political bodies that are that
are our two major parties. There is today even another
category of the public group which must be kept in
mind by the Engineer of Consent. The readers of the
New Republic or the listeners to Raymond Swing's program are
as much voluntary groups, although unorganized, as are the members
of a trade union or rotary club. He mentions podcasting,
mm hmm, bingo, he mentions newsletters, He mentions blogs. Yeah,
the reader the readers of sub stack, or the listeners
of uh yeah, you know, countical wars. Yeah, there as
much voluntary groups, although unorganized, and are as are the
members of a trade union or a rotary club. To
function well, almost all organized groups elect or select leaders,
who usually remain in a controlling position for stated intervals
of time. These leaders reflect their followers' wishes and work
to promote their interests. In a democratic society, they can
only lead them as far as and in the direction
in which they want to go. To influence the public,
the engineer of consent works with and through group leaders
and opinion molders on every level.
Speaker 2: That's that's kind of what I was alluding to earlier.
They can, they can only lead them as far as
and in the direction in which they want to go,
so that the the opinion molders. Their job is to
push that further because normal people that just work and
have a family are only comfortable with such such a position,
so their opinion. Their job now is to mold that
and push it in a direction that they're not necessarily
comfortable with, which is why you do it by means
of comfort and safety and freedom, because if you can't
just come out and go, we want this new, crazy,
tyrannical thing, so just do it. Okay, you have to
push it in a friendly manner that plays on people's
love for comfort and like I said, safety, freedom, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Or I mean you could just basically what they do
now is buy people off.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Threatened, Yeah, threaten people. I mean you can threaten people.
Who was I talking about? I was talking about Elon,
you know Elon talking about stepping down and everything like that.
I'm like, well, I mean, he's a guy who concentrates
a lot on his other work space is his stupid
AI stuff brand implant stuff, which is a complete joke
just to get money and get rich. A shit doesn't work. Sorry, Sorry,
all you people who want it to work, it doesn't.
And he was talking about how he wants to step down,
you know, and I was like, well, he either genuinely
wants to step down or these threats against his kids
are real. Mmm.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I'm not one, you know. I mean,
I don't go so far. I mean, I entertain conspiracies,
but I rarely talk about them publicly. I rarely never
talk about the conspiracies that I entertained publicly. But I
mean that when you take into consideration he's talking about, Hey,
my kids are being tracked, somebody jumped on my cauld
and you know that could all be a sye op.
I know, I know it could all be a sy op.
But there's another you know, there's something else there that
they've just and again, to me, that's just another ham
fested approach because they've lost the ability to craft the narrative,
like Brene's teacher them here. Either they've lost that ability
due to technology, the Internet, things like that, being able
to debunk a story within minutes of it coming out,
or they're just not that smart. And I tend to
you why not both both? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Both?
Speaker 1: And yeah, all right, values and techniques of research. To
achieve accurate working knowledge of the receptivity of the public
mind to an idea or ideas, it is necessary to
engage in painstaking research. Such research should aim to establish
a common denominator between the researcher and the public. Let
me read that again. Such research should aim to establish
a common denominator between the researcher and the public. It
should disclose the realities of the objective situation in which
the engineer of consent has to work completed, It provides
a blueprint of action and clarifies the question of who
does what, where, when and why. It will indicate the
overall strategy to be employed, the themes to be stressed,
the organization needed, the use of media, and the day
to day tactics. It should further indicate how long it
will take to win the public and what are the
short and long term trends of public thinking. Low and
high time preference. It will disclose subconscious and that's that's
the way the left one they understand low and high
time preference. Low time preference is taking one hundred years,
the one hundred year march through the you know, through
the institutions. The high time preferences when they do get
in power, getting as much power in the short term
as possible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the.
Speaker 1: Way people have to start thinking. It will disclose subconscious
and conscious motivations in public thought and the actions, words,
and pictures that affect these motivations. It will reveal public
awareness the low or high visibility of ideas in the
public mind. Research may indicate the necessity to modify original objectives,
to enlarge or contract the plan goal, or to change
actions and methods. In short, it furnishes the equivalent of
the mariner's chart, the architect's blueprint, the traveler's roadmap. It's
when it comes to your thoughts and your beliefs and
what you're willing to put up with that's such a
In short, it furnishes the equivalent of just basically a
roadmap on how to do that, and it just seems
like it minimizes the choosing those phrases, minimizes exactly what
they're doing to you. Public opinion research may be conducted
by questionnaires, by personal interviews, or by polls. Contact can
be made with business leaders, heads of trade organizations, trade
union officials, and educational leaders, all of whom may be
willing to aid the engineer.
Speaker 2: Of consent algorithms.
Speaker 1: Now, yeah, yeah, easy, They're easy.
Speaker 2: They don't need all of those things.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, didn't Elon by Twitter because you know
he was upset that the babylon be got kicked off?
Or did he want all that info?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Right? The head of professional groups in the communities, the
medical association, the architects, the engineers all should be queried. Sociuld,
social service executives, officials of women's clubs and religious leaders. Editors,
publishers and radio station and motion picture people can be
persuaded to discuss with the consent engineer his objectives and
the appeals and angles that affect these leaders and their audiences.
Speaker 2: You can go to Dyer has a book all about this,
two books. I believe this is exactly the CIA and
quote unquote deep state infiltration through Hollywood and just to
craft narratives.
Speaker 1: The way I read this the sentence, editors, publishers and
radio station and motion picture people can be persuaded to
discuss with the consent engineer, his objectives and the appeals
and angles that affect these leaders and their audiences. To me,
that presupposes that they're already on board.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, Yeah, good point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the local unions or association of barbers, railwaymen and
clothing workers, and taxi cab drivers may be willing to
cooperate in the undertaking. Grass Roots leaders are important. Such
a survey has Yeah, such a survey has a double
barreled effect. The engineer of consent learns what group leaders
know and do not know, the extent to which they
will cooperate with him. The media that reached them, appeals
that let me read that again, the engine that's a
weird sentence the way he structured it. The engineer of
consent learns what group leaders know and do not know,
the extent to which they will cooperate with him, the
media that reached them, appeals that may be valid, and
the prejudices, the legends, or the facts by which they live.
He is able simultaneously to determine whether or not they
will conduct informational campaigns in their own right and thus
supplement his activities. Yeah, there's something so insidious about this,
I know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean unfortunately brilliant as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And I mean I know saying there's something
so insidious about this is really understanding it and obvious
at this point, but just something about that paragraph really
turns my stomach. Theme strategy an organization. Now that the
preliminary work has been done, it will be possible to
proceed to actual planning from the survey. From the survey
of opinion will emerge the major themes of strategy. These
themes contain the ideas to be conveyed. They channel the
lines of approach to the public, and they must be
expressed through whatever media are used. The themes are ever present,
but intangible, comparable to what in fiction is called the
story line. To be successful, the themes must appeal to
the motives of the public. Motives are the activation of
both conscious and subconscious pressures created by the force of desires.
Psychologists have isolated a number of compelling appeals, the validity
of which have been repeatedly proved in practical application. Once
the themes are established, in what kind of a campaign
are they to be used. The situation may call for
a blitzkrieg or a continuing battle, a combination of both,
or some other strategy. It may be as necessary to
develop a plan of action for an election that will
be over in a few weeks or months, or for
a campaign that may take years, such as the effort
to cut down the tuberculosis rate death rate. Planning for
mass persuasion or the COVID death rate. Planning for mass
persuasion is governed by many factors that call upon all
one's powers of training, experience, skill and judgment. Planning should
be flexible and provide for what for conditions change for
Planning should be flexible and provide for changed conditions.
Speaker 2: Mm hm, boy, think of the last few years, all
of these things.
Speaker 1: You're not going to convince me that the people in charge,
I mean, the people who are really in charge, right,
haven't read these things, don't know these things. When the
plans have been perfected, organization of resources follows, and it
must be undertaken in advance to provide the necessary manpower, money,
and physical equipment. Organization also correlates the activities of any
specialists who may be called upon from time to time,
such as opinion researchers, fundraisers, publicity men, radio and motion
picture experts, specialists for women's clubs and foreign language groups
and the like. Really got those foreign language groups down,
I mean they basically own them. Now they can get
them to march in a moment's notice the tactics. At
this point it will be possible to plan the tactics
of the program, i e. To decide how the themes
are to be disseminated over the idea carriers the networks
of communication do not think of tactics in terms of
segmental approaches. The problem is not to get articles into
a newspaper, or obtain radio time, or arrange a motion
picture newsreel. It is rather to set in motion of
broad activity, the success of which depends on interlocking all
phases and elements of the proposed strategy, implementing by tactics
that are time to the moment of maximum effectiveness. It's
a battle, That's the way you plan a battle. That's
the way you plan a war. Yeah yeah. An action
held over, but one day may fall completely flat. Skilled
and imaginative timing has determined the success of many mass
movements and campaigns. The familiar phenomena so typical of the
American people's behavior pattern. Emphasis of the consent engineer's activities
will be on the written and spoken word, geared to
the media and designed for the audiences he is addressing.
He must be sure that his material fits his public.
He must prepare a copy written in simple language and
six teen word sentences for the average school age public.
Speaker 2: You can do less words. Now wear the damn mask. Yeah,
to take the take the jab.
Speaker 1: It's all quick, it's all bumper stickers.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: Some copy will be aimed at the understanding of people
or as I was thinking, two hundred and forty characters. Yeah, fair,
Some copy will be aimed at the understanding of people
who have had seventeen years of schooling. He must familiarize
himself with all media and know how to supply them
with material, material suitable in quantity and quality. Primarily, however,
the engineer of consent must create news.
Speaker 2: Bingo, there's some there's some real gems in the next
two paragraphs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, news is not an inanimate thing. It's funny. I
have an episode coming out with tom Us seven seven
seven that dropped before I dropped this, and he talked,
we talk about politics, and we talk about politics from
how Europeans, you know, turn of the century looked at
politics nineteen you know, nineteen to twentieth century, and they
looked at politics as this. It was mysterious to them.
They didn't think they knew at all, there was something.
It was something other, and we've been convinced to believe
that it's simple. It's A and B and ab A
plus B will see and it's left versus right as this.
And when you try to introduce somebody and say, hey,
read this, you know it's it's a political text, but
it may be something that you it's different than anything
you've read. And you know, somebody I recommended Imperium to
somebody by Jaki and they said, uh, after just a
few pages, like is it going to stay this so esoteric?
Speaker 2: Uh huh.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, that's kind of the point of why
why he wrote it, because everything at that point, at
the time he wrote it was becoming politics A plus
B we'll see.
Speaker 2: Yes, that there's not to bring everything to Orthodoxy, but
Eastern orthodox like mentality is very much different from the
religion that you certainly that I grew up with, because
there is no well, where's the proof that there is three?
There's a triune God, Where's where's the proof of this?
I don't get this, this logic and all of these things,
and the Eastern Europeans don't think of it in those terms.
And we're swimming in it, so it's it's interesting, same
same kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Right, just read Reading news is not an inananamate thing,
it's just that's so. Let me start this paragraph over inain.
Primarily yeah, primarily, However, the engineer of consent must create news.
News is not an inadamate thing. It is the overt
act that makes news, and news in turn shapes the
attitudes and actions of people. A good criterion as to
whether something is or is not news is whether the
event juts out of the pattern of routine. It's disruptive.
It has to it has to be disruptive. The developing
of events and circumstances that are not routine is one
of the basic functions of the engineer of consent. Event
so planned can be projected over the communications systems to
infinitely more people than those actually participating, and such events
vividly dramatized ideas for those who do not witness the events.
Speaker 2: False flags we go like this next this next paragraph too,
But go ahead, Pete, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let me just say this. Okay, So the war,
the absolute worst thing that has happened in the last
twelve months is one country invaded in another country. Something
that's been happening from millennia. This is humanity.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: Russia invading Ukraine one section of Ukraine is what humanity is.
The history of man To believe any other is to
believe in the Whig theory of history, that we're just
supposed to be progressively getting better. I mean, if you
believe that you're on the side of the progressives. Sorry,
if you have a Ukraine flag, I don't care if
you're a hoppy in or if you're a libertarian or whatever,
you are on the side of the progressives. You have progressed.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Yes, yes, preach.
Speaker 1: You, I mean you. War is who we are? Who
started World War Two? Well, Germany invaded Poland and so
that why did England have to declare war? England started
the war because Germany invaded Poland. So what something that's
been happening for the history of mankind. That's a problem.
People are going to die. Come on, come on, people,
wake the fuck up. This is who we are. It's
not changing. And if it does change, when it changes,
well now you're going to have a forty one percent
suicide rate from people who think that they can change
and they can somehow perfect themselves. Quit the fucking bullshit. People.
The imaginatively managed event can compete successfully with other events
for attention. Imaginatively managed managed.
Speaker 2: Yes, this entire next paragraph is explaining what a psyop
is for people.
Speaker 1: The imaginatively managed event can compete successfully with other events
for attention. Newsworthy events involving people usually do not happen
by accident. They are planned deliberately to accomplish a purpose
to influence our ideas and actions.
Speaker 2: Wow, what a paragraph.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know how. I mean, it's written
so plainly. How do you comment on it?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I mean yeah, I mean it's written so plainly. I
almost just took a picture of that paragraph and just
posted it on Twitter. I mean, it is what it is.
There's not there's not a lot of interpretation needed for that,
because again, this man was brilliant with words and knowing
exactly how they're going to land on most people. So
so they are planned deliberately to accomplish a purpose to
influence our ideas and actions.
Speaker 1: There's no Summer of George very Lean mm hm, the
very Lean. There's nothing. There's nothing that can be misinterpreted there, right, Yeah,
Summer of George. Yeah, that was a Wow. Events may
also be set up in chain reaction. By harnessing the
energies of group leaders, the engineer of consent can stimulate
them to set in motion activities of their own. They
will organize additional specialized subsidiary events, all of which will
further dramatize the basic theme. I And that's just how
directors being Billy Wilder being pulled in to make these
ridiculous holocausts films in Germany being flown in to you know,
it's like, oh, look at the shrunken heads.
Speaker 2: Uh huh right right, shrunk and heads?
Speaker 1: Huh okay? Or can you show me anyone in Europe
who has hair like that? Any group in Europe that
has hair like that on these shrunken head who's shrinking heads?
Where do they get this? What are we talking about here?
And looks like we're almost done here? Conclusion. Communication is
the key to engineering consent for social action. Communication is
the key to engineering consent for social action. But it
is not enough to get out leaflets and bulletins on
the mimeograph machines, to place releases in the newspapers, or
to fill the airwaves with radio talks, words, sounds, and
pictures accomplished little unless they are the tools of a
soundly thought out lan and carefully organized methods.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's literally telling us there is no objective news reporting.
There's no point, is what he's saying. Without some type
of meaning and driving the narrative in some direction and
an organized method, there's no point. I mean, even we're
doing it, if you think about it, Pete, we're we're
doing this to push a narrative that we believe should
be pushed. So I mean, even we are doing.
Speaker 1: This, Yeah, I'm and you know, hopefully people listening realize
that we're doing this because we think that these people
are evil and we want we want to see them destroyed,
and hopefully they agree with us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you at least have to know what they're
doing to us. And this is pretty black and white.
Speaker 1: And I will and at least we're honest enough to
say what we want. Yeah, these are the ends that
we want. Now, how do we get there? How do
we how do we use this this information to get there?
To fight back? If the plans are well formulated and
the proper uses made of them, the ideas conveyed by
the words will become part and parcel of the people themselves.
Speaker 2: M I mean, I can't not think of COVID, but
I know there's plenty of other examples. But man, having
just gone through a we saw for the last few years,
this is so pertinent.
Speaker 1: There are still people on the internet talking about we
need to fight them over there, We're gonna be fighting
them over here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You run into the you run into the boomer every
once in a while.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I had someone telling me that we have to
back Ukraine because Putin is a communist.
Speaker 1: So I had somebody I was on a live stream
yesterday and apparently there was somebody in the comments who
I was on someone else's show, and they said that
this person is what they describe was that this person
was scared of the Peter Tiels of the world. And
you know that there's a growing right wing totalitarian tendency
and oh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a threat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I'm yeah, and I'm just like, I'm down
with it. I'm sorry, sorry, You're You're definitely appreciated of
the wrong choir here, buddy, You're definitely in the wrong church.
Because I'm like, how's it gonna be worse than what
we have now?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, It's like people are like, oh, we just start
a Catholic monarchy or something like that. I'm like, how
it would be worse than what we have now, Okay,
give me all these give me all these things. It's like,
I'm sorry, I'm not one of these people who well
it's it's all totalitarianism, you know. It's like, I'm sorry.
Those are my libertarian days. Those are gone. I can
I think I can think on my feet now, I
can have nuanced thought. I don't you know. My answer
to everything is just abolish whatever it is.
Speaker 2: Abolish the state, Just.
Speaker 1: Abolish the statement. Everything will be great, all right. When
the public is convinced of the soundness of an idea,
it will proceed to action. People translate, and I yeah.
People translate an idea into action suggested by the idea itself,
whether it is ideological, political, or social. People translate an
idea into actions digested by the idea itself.
Speaker 2: Yes, we're a mask.
Speaker 1: They may adopt the philosophy that stresses racial and religious tolerance.
They may vote a new deal into office, or they
may organize a consumer's buying strike. But such results do
not just happen in a democracy. They can be accomplished
principally by the engineering of consent.
Speaker 2: I find it interesting that examples are used.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, they may adopt the philosophy that stresses racial
and religious tolerance. I mean, look at look at where's
what's your nineteen forty seven? Yeah, the Nuremberg regime is
being implemented along with a new Deal regime and right
wing thoughts, right wing thoughts being criminalized. And you know,
if you're you can't be too right wing. Now you
can't have an opinion on race. You can't have an
opinion on other people's religion unless our Christian Yeah. And
or they may vote a new Deal into office and
organize a consumers buying strike. Well, the reason he mentions
consumers buying strike is because, I mean, when you read propaganda,
much of it is talking about advertising. Yes, so you
know he he thinks he's very consumer minded. When he
thinks good goes to him, advertising and propaganda is exactly
the same thing.
Speaker 2: Mad men. For those people that are fans of the show.
Speaker 1: What a great show?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 1: But I mean did you ever like look at like
his living room and be like, I wish I could
do my living Oh?
Speaker 2: Well, shit, you know the answer to that, well, yes, yes, absolutely,
I'm trying to do it that way. Yeah. The the
set design on that thing is that alone. The aesthetics
of the show are beautiful. But yeah, the contents excellent.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That living room that he had where you stepped
down into the.
Speaker 2: Living room, the sunken one, oh my god.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And you know that's just basically trying to sell
us on that idea.
Speaker 2: Uh huh, I know, Pagan it is. Yeah, And every
night I watched it, it sold me on the idea of
making an old fashioned I'll consent to that.
Speaker 1: See. You know how many times I bought bought a
gun because I saw it in a movie.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: I had to go get a glock thirty four because
I watched Man on Fire.
Speaker 2: Oh nice, Okay, think of Dirty Harry. Get the three
fifty seven magnums.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. That Smith and Wesson is so I mean,
the price on it is insane. You try and find one, Yeah, because.
Speaker 2: Because of that sixty four and Paul is easy Snoop
Dogg that whole scene, sixty fours are the most expensive ones. Now,
same thing, Yeah, buyre right into it.
Speaker 1: But I mean, this is the fact that I'll say
this again. I think I said at the beginning, the
fact that this is just out there, that this is
something that we can that was given to us, that
anyone can read. But think about it, not anyone can
read this. You and I can read this because this
is because we have the ability to read this, we
have the ability to see through it. But so many
people have can't read into it because of what it teaches,
because of what's in there has been used on them.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So when we start talking about, you know, when we're
like common stuff that just makes you know how you know?
Or I'll say how is Israel a democratic? A democratic country?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: They'll say, oh, it's the only democratic country in the region.
And I'll describe the system of government and I'll be like,
how is it democratic? Mm hmmm, it's basically a socialisteth
in the state. Yes, so why do you not see that? Well,
and then they go, well, I don't care. And then
the next day, even though I've just proved to them,
they'll be They'll be back to saying it's the only democratic,
democratic country in the region.
Speaker 2: Yep. I could go right now on Facebook and right
COVID was a syop and someone that would fall for
this the tricks that are in this paper would go, oh,
so you don't think it's real or something stupid like
that straw manning it. And it's like, without going you
know what, there's a possitive and I could even read them.
I could play in this episode and say, now, think
of this in terms of what we how COVID and
the propaganda man it manifested itself. And then there's so
many people that would go, now that's a that's pushing
a little too far or something like that, and it's like, okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it floors me that the reason why people could
read this and not really understand what it says is
because of what it says.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's brilliance to what it says. That's why unfortunately
this works wonderfully.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what do you go going on?
Speaker 2: Man?
Speaker 1: What do you got planned?
Speaker 2: Let's see? I got uh? When is do you know
when this one's gonna drop? I can advertise the show
that's going to come out from Counterflow that week.
Speaker 1: First week in the year New Year.
Speaker 2: Okay, I don't know, well, I don't know the episode
that's going to be on yet that one, but I
just recorded with doctor Mark McDonald, who I've had on
a few times. We talked about this isn't controversy. Yeah,
he's awesome, This is not controversial at all, Why American
women are undtable, and what happened to the American man.
So we get into that he is brilliant, brilliant and
let's see fearless.
Speaker 1: Fearless says he wants.
Speaker 2: He does, yeah, and says it so wonderfully polished, where
I'm like, man, I wish I could articulate the things
as well as he can. But we also talk about
the depression that happens two people among U around Christmas
and how to get out of that and why that's
a sad and unfortunate thing, and he gives some good suggestions.
So yeah, So does that mean this will be the
first episode of the Pete Cognona Show all year?
Speaker 1: I don't know yet. Okay, Yeah, we'll see.
Speaker 2: Okay, My birthday is January third. That would be just
a great present.
Speaker 1: Is January January third? Is Is that the Is it
Tuesday or is it a Monday?
Speaker 2: I should know that since it's my birthday. Haven't looked.
Let me see.
Speaker 1: I think it's it's Tuesday. Ye Tuesday, so I could
drop it on your I could drop it on your
birthday as long as it's uh, it won't but it
won't be the first one of the year.
Speaker 2: Got it. No, Yeah, no worries, other things going on
by then, I hope to be I should be back
on YouTube. I'm in the same category as you where
I've got two strikes in a certain amount of time,
so I'm trying to be careful as to not lose
everything I put on there. Let's see, that's about it now.
I do have a Rumble channel, so because of this threat,
I have had to open up a Rumble channel. So
all those listening out there, this is a good platform
for me to finally sell that I'm bad at advertising,
speaking of my man, but I do have a Rumble channel,
so go subscribe to it. Pete Canonis listeners.
Speaker 1: And I don't even know if I've an I have
a Rumble channel too, because when I when I got
my second strike, it was like, all right, I need
to put have someplace else to put it up. I've
been putting up on Odyssey this whole time, so my
audit I even have playlists on my Odyssey channel of
the Thomas seven seven seven, World War two. I have
started the Cold War one with him, has five episodes there.
I've put the the reading of Industrial Society in the
Future with Aaron State and Revolution by Lenin with Aaron.
So my Odyssey channel is probably more robust than my
YouTube channel because there are things on Odyssey that are
not on YouTube, like my e Michael Jones interview and
oh my own my own Benjamin interview. Yeah, those things
were they were not going to survive YouTube.
Speaker 2: So uh, there's they're spicy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and of course those you know, it's it's so
weird because I know you've gotten your strikes are over
the bug.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, my es are over the thing in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the thing that happened in November. It's just yeah,
it's so weird. It's like really going after you know,
like they picked something and it's like, that's what we're
going to look for on this channel. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't pick trans stuff, it's weird.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Or World economic form that's strange. You talk about
the World Economic form all you want and they don't.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You were the first one to kind of let
that creep into my mind, and I haven't forgot about it.
That is interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like, hmmm, well I think you know, I
think and the other example that I use, well, if
you talk about this, then it's a that's a no
go on YouTube. Then you wonder maybe the this is
in charge of the World Economic Forum?
Speaker 2: So ah, yes, gotcha, what's.
Speaker 1: What I I assume? So yeah, and my assumptions have
been wrong often and if I'm prove it wrong, I
will admit it, promise. Fuck, it's always a pleasure.
Speaker 2: I think that was right, by the way, I think
that assumption is right. Yeah, but yeah, yeah, Pete. Always
always a pleasure to be on here. Thank you so much. Man,
good to see you and get a chat with you.
Speaker 1: I enjoyed it. Thank you.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanona Show.
Filos is back and another portrait of a twentieth century
figure in American history. Are you known Filos?
Speaker 3: I'm doing very well. It is my great displeasure to
bring you this person we're dealing with tonight. Like many others,
I've been kind of hoodwinked by the propaganda and uh
everything even down to the words that we use and
the thoughts that we have in our modern dialogue and conversation.
It all originates from this guy. There's many, many examples
that we'll be going through. But I didn't really realize
how insidious this Edward Burnet's guy was. It's really something.
Speaker 1: Well, let me just start off with this question. I'm
e're you would just have to call him a moral right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, throughout throughout his I don't want to call it
quite a career, because it's really more of a force
of nature. He there's there's never an ought in all
of his books and all of his interviews U and
the man lived to be about one hundred. It was
only right around his one hundredth birthday that he had
everything anything even approaching a conscience. And I wouldn't even
go that far as to call it like a conscience.
I think it was sort of this deep realization that
he had really route up the state of the world
and the way that people interact. But I think it
was even beyond him to comprehend no moral fiber, no
moral backbone, responsible for a tremendous amount of evil. That's
how I would characterize him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, completely, Yeah, the uh, once you start reading him
and you start getting into him and there's a lot
to learn that you can learn from him. Most of
it is going to be of the negative, the negative swords,
basically how to how to manipulate. But probably what's more
important then is that you learn how you're being manipulated
and so that you can approach it and yeah, not
fall for it.
Speaker 3: It was funny because, as I want to do, I
was talking to my wife last night and I was
telling her just how crazy all this stuff was, all
these different examples, and she told me something pretty obvious,
which is that, well, on the one hand, the American
people were kind of primed and ready to be manipulated,
and that they don't want to think really deeply about things.
And she kind of posed me this question, in this country,
how could it have been any different? And I'm inclined
to agree with her, although I think if a man
like Brene's had never lived, the entire course of the
twentieth century would have been changed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, So why don't you get into it and
we'll decide whether it was for the better. I think
we all know it wasn't, But maybe there are some
people out there who are we'll think that he did
a good I don't know so we'll start with a
few little callouts.
Speaker 3: Pete previously put out an episode on Mister Brene's episode
eight thirty five with Buck John's back in December of
twenty two, and it covered specifically one of his lesser
known books, called The Engineering of Consent, and that title
should already raise some eyebrows. Really liked all your different
callouts of the different different figures and companies within that document,
and I had a lot of thoughts on it. But
we'll circle around back to that. The way that most
people encounter Burne's if you're my age or around then
I'm about thirty, they encounter him through Adam Curtis's The
Century of the Self, and that is a four part
documentary which covers the theories of Sigmund Freud and how
it developed consumerism and political control throughout the twentieth century.
And it's worth a watch just for a form of entertainment.
Academic agents covered it. But the central referential ideas, the
presuppositions before I talk about mister Burne's, are the following.
The first thing to keep in mind is that Burnees
lived from eighteen ninety one until nineteen ninety five. He
was lucid until the end of his life, and he
always had both a vested interest and an active career
in what he was doing. So the entirety of the
twentieth century happened for the most part under his his methods.
Let's say there's some key background information that you need
to be aware of before understanding the life of mister Burne's.
The first is that the global population tripled in the
nineteenth century, and that means a tripling of the goods
that are produced in the world and the amounts that
are consumed in the world. Prior to Burne's living, advertising
as an American industry is widely popular. Americans in the
nineteenth century were far and away the most literal population,
and they'd also previously encountered people trying to lie to
them in the form of yellow journalism. They'd been swayed
in literature, in broadsheets, in newspapers and periodicals, pamphlets and
brochures that causes like abolition, and also they'd even experienced
false flags like the USS main in eighteen ninety eight.
So this was not entirely new to mister Burne's but
he really perfected the art of manipulating people, and that's
not a pejorative word. One of his books before it
was called Crystallizing Public Opinion. As actually a rebrand it
was called Manipulating Public Opinion, The Why and the How.
So there's a few other little core ideas here. The
first to understand is how Americans spent money prior to
the life of mister Burne's. Credit cards in their modern
didn't come about until the fifties. And the way that
advertising worked was that generally producers and some middlemen advertisers
would outline all the different qualities of a physical product
in something like a catalog or a periodical, and it
would have a certain amount of space in a newspaper,
and it would list all the merits of the product.
It would list how well made it was, all the
different aspects of it, and a person would look at
it and make an informed decision. Because the way that
somebody acquired a good was that they would have to
write to an address and request a product and usually
send money, and then it would take several weeks or
months and then the product would be shipped to them.
And you could even do this for something as large
as a house. But the twentieth century, after the Industrial
Revolution in the United States was immensely prosperous, and the
demand for consumer goods began to rapidly increase, and especially
in cities where the population was rapidly increasing, demand for
products was increasing, and so to some extent someone like
Burnees was inevitable. Someone had to come along and turn
this old way of advertising into something new. So to
start with some just basic ideas here Edward Burne's Edward
Burnees is the nephew of Sigmund Freud. In eighteen eighty
Jacob Burnez, the uncle of Freud's fiance, wrote a book
on the concept of Catharsis and Aristotle's poetic so that
detailed a lot of the different aspects of the Freudian
father son dynamic.
Speaker 1: And also.
Speaker 3: Edward Burnes's mother was courted by Sigmund Freud from eighteen
eighty eight to eighteen eighty six, and over four years
Sigmund Freud sent Martha Burneze over nine hundred letters. She
was the daughter of the chief Rabbi of Hamburg. So
Freud is marrying up endogamously, which means within the kilan
and in Yiddish there's a word for it, which is yichus.
So she brings status into the marriage. And there's something
you should know about Brene's being a especially a Viennese
Jew from Austria. Viennese Jews are incredibly tribal. Most of
their marriages are arranged and it's very up into this day,
it's very much focused on status. So Freud was actually
pretty penniless and pretty low status within this environment. So
in order to become a respectable person, he has to
marry into a respectable family. And that delineation between the
old world and the new is really not so strict
for especially Western European Jews. So even though Brenees is
born in America in eighteen ninety one, he's very routinely
going back to the Austrian Alps to go ski, being
with his uncle Sigmund Freud, very close to him, and
he learns a lot of his methods. But we'll get
to that a little bit later. Let's see to do.
The gist of Edward Burnet's in advertising is that he
took Sigmund Freud's ideas and used them to manipulate the masses.
The way that he did that is by linking mass
produced goods they don't need to their unconscious desires, something
like sex and violence. The theory is that if you
give people enough goods to make them happy and docile,
they aren't a threat to the power structure. The concept
of a person in the nineteenth century is very different
than what we consider nowadays. A person has a public
and a private self prior to the twentieth century. In public,
they're expected to keep their emotions under control. They're they're
expected to dress modestly and conduct themselves morally. But Freud
had a theory that by using psychoanalysis on dreams and
free association between concepts, a person can uncover their subconscious
sexual and violent forces, which people naturally suppress. Now, what
do you do with that information? Well, to some extent,
Freud wanted to use this knowledge to help uncover people's
I hate to insert modern psychobabble bullshit, but trauma and
help them work through it. But Brenes saw this mechanism
and realized that he could feed on people's inner desires
to get them to buy stuff. And there's some very
interesting facts about Brenees in nineteen seventeen, so he's a
very young man. Still, he's not yet thirty he was
working as a press agent for an opera singer named
Caruso and Rico Caruso Brenes's parents, So again that's uh,
you know, he's the nephew Freud. They'd come to the
United States, but he kept going back to see him
very frequently, and there's a lot of other European travel
that happens. Now. It was a very interesting fact that
I wasn't directly able to corroborate from a primary source.
But this is from a book called Conspirator's Hierarchy, The
Story of the Committee of three Hundred, by doctor John Coleman,
and they found this book actually in bin Laden's Abbadabad compound.
This source. This book alleges that Brene's was a board
member alongside members of high status British people like Rothmere
north Cliff and Walter Lippmann, and that they were all
part of something called Wellington House, which was the British
War propaganda bureau during World War One that was founded
by the Rothschilds had read and proposed as a guide
the writings of a certain Miss Walsh called The Climax
of Civilization, which espoused a one world government thesis this
Wellington House organization later became the basis of the Tavistock Institute.
That's the same institute that came up with the word
isolationist as a pejorative in World War One and World
War Two. It was supposedly at the Wellington Houses directive
that Brene's led President Wilson to set up the Creole Commission,
and is this secondary fact is detailed in one of
my other primary sources. So this is a very different
story than the narrative that Brene's tells to the public.
What he says is that his vision wasn't good enough,
and that he wasn't able to enter the US Armed
Forces in World War One, and that he had to
be a part of the Council for Public Relations, sorry
the United States Information Agency, And he was also in
this capacity invited over to the Peace Conference in Paris,
and he did a lot of the pr stuff for
most of Woodrow Wilson's administration. But depending on the source
that you look at, either he's a very intelligent and
fortuitous man who threw his own merit at the age
of in his mid twenties, is advising President Wilson on
all matters of war propaganda, or alternatively he's been installed
there by the Tavistock Institute and by association the roth Childs.
Can't quite verify it, but it makes a lot more
sense than the narrative, he says. Another second fact that
I have to back this up is that Burne's worked
with Arnold Toynbee at the Wellington House, and I do
have a physical copy it's in a green booklet from
nineteen fifteen of Arnold Toynbee's writings on the so called
rape of Belgium by the German forces, which was all
contrived in all propaganda. And if you look in the book,
it's all lithographics, so it's not pictures. It's just like
this overly detailed description of war propaganda which is intended
to aggrieve the British public against the British. So I
do have that aspect of it, which is real.
Speaker 1: So the British public against the Germans, I believe you said,
the British public against the British.
Speaker 3: Oh sorry, my bad, the British public the Germans, I mean, yeah,
And so extend it was the Brits working against the
Brits and their actual interest.
Speaker 1: Anyway, Brits with Brits with scare quotes.
Speaker 3: There, Yeah, big scare quotes. What's interesting is that Brene's
sets up what's called the Committee on Public Information in
World War One, and he was specifically tasking himself with
the Latin America. That's important, that'll come up later. The
role of the CPI was to advance pro war narratives
and also just create propaganda. In his own words, he
was doing this quote, to make the world safe for democracy.
The propaganda that he chose to use to market Wilson
was about how the new individual would be free in
a post war world. And then of course he gets
back from the Paris a peace conference and there's an
interview and you can watch it on archive dot org
and he says, well, quote, if I decided, if you
could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it
for peace. And they'd already perfected this technique. During World
War One. The CPI trained so called four minute men
to go around to churches and fraternal organizations and women's
clubs and colleges and to give little talk points to
gatherings of people. By the end of the war, seventy
five thousand of these trained people had delivered more than
three quarters of a million speeches reaching three hundred and
fifteen million people. That's quite a claim, and it also
is a tremendous amount of power. And it's pretty obvious
why would you just walk away from that much influence
in propaganda and control after the war? Now, this whole time,
and in many of these books he keeps making reference
to Walter Littman. Walter Littman published a book called Public Opinion.
He coined the term gatekeeper and explained that journalists had
become the gatekeepers, the instruments of a comprehensive manipulation of
public opinion direct quote from Litmann. Here, the gatekeepers decide
what will be admitted to the public and what will
be withheld. Every paper when it reaches the reader is
the result of a whole series of selections. So by
using this rule of selection, they create a consensus in reporting,
and an audience that views it sees this consensus, and
it confirms their opinions. It's eventually a big marketing ploy.
By nineteen twenty, propaganda starts to become a bad word
because all these different sides of the conflict are using it.
So you have to not have the you can't have
it called the CPI anymore, anything related expressly to propaganda.
You have to call it the Council on Public Relations.
And if you have ever seen a brief diversion here,
so after the war he set up the Council on
Public Relations. When you look at a picture online of
an early twentieth century American city, you'll see something very
different than a city of today with all of its cars.
What you'll see is hordes of people everywhere these big
broad avenues, people walking down it. There's some carriages, but
for the most part, it's just thousands and tens of
thousands of people going about their lives in the city.
They're walking on foot for the most part, and that
means that the way that information gets to these people
is through social circles. Remember it's nineteen twenty, so this
is before radio and television, so in some ways it's
easier to sway people, but it also requires a little
bit more convincing because in a social group there's more
pressure try and disprove something that you don't think that
you can trust. After the war, Edward Brenees sends his
uncle Sigmund Freud a box of Cuban cigars, and in return,
Freud sends him his book recently published and English, The
General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. This is when it becomes a
big problem and Burnees gets obsessed with psychoanalysis. Some little
things about his early advertising career. Mister Burne's is the
reason why women started smoking everywhere in the world. That's
quite the claim. In nineteen twenty he meets with American
Tobacco Corporation, which is a huge tobacco corporation. You'll also
recall maybe that Forrestall worked there for a time, so
it's a big company. It's where you go to make
your bones. And American Tobacco Corporation says, well, we'd like
you to start selling cigarettes to women because right now
we only have half the market of potential smokers, and
we could double our profits in production, double the size
of our entire industry. Well, Burnez realizes that he has
to understand the subconscious of a woman, and he goes
to a psychoanalyst, well, very prominent one named AA Brill,
and Brill says that cigarettes operating in the Freudian school,
that cigarettes represent the penis and thus there is a
taboo on male sexuality. There but if women were presented
with the idea of challenging male power, then women would
smoke because they have their own penises. And now that
sounds insane, But Burnees takes this idea and he realizes
that he has to just make it some incendiary show.
So the New York Easter Day Parades, I think it's
nineteen nineteen or nineteen twenty. He gets a couple hundred rich, single,
pretty white women to walk in the parade, and then
at Brene's's signal, they're all supposed to take cigarettes out
of their clothes and spark them. And Brene's about five
minutes before this happens. He goes over to the press
pool and he says, hey, I hear that there are
suffragettes and they're going to go protest by smoking quote
torches of freedom. And so the press runs over there
and they get all hopped up and they're taking all
these pictures of all these attractive young women smoking cigarettes
with this nice branded little slogan, and now the taboo
is broken and it becomes the cool thing to do.
And that's how in the nineteen twenties women began smoking cigarettes.
And he does a lot with women's organizations, because now
that he is using psychoanalysis to understand women's desires, he
kind of can get them to feel better by using
a product or service. He was employed by William Randolph
Hurst to promote his new women's magazines. You also have
to consider the general metric that in the United States,
for every two dollars that a man makes, a woman
will spend three. And that's not like a callous anecdote,
that's a real statistic. There's another little point here, Oh,
his wife, Edward Burnees's wife. So in nineteen twenty three
he marries a woman named Doris Fleischmann. She was the
first married woman to be issued a United States passport
in her maiden name in nineteen twenty five. And I'm
just going to propose something here. A man, okay, if
you have your wife, go and get a passport in
your maiden name. And it's something no one has ever
done before in the United States and the entire history.
But your wife is the very first person who's somehow
able to do this. I think it's pretty likely that
you're able to bullshit your way out of getting draft
it into World War One. If you have the power
and ability to alter this status and convention and regulation
around US passports just a thought. Missus Fleischmann marched in
the nineteen seventeen Women's Peace Parade in New York City
and was also a very prominent suffragette. I think that's
really ironic considering how she married the chief propagandist of
World War One, who was in charge of soliciting public
funds and efforts and attention towards getting into the war.
After her marriage with Brenees, she begins to start her
own public relations firm and launch product campaigns for cottonseed
oil and radium products within households. They also host a
CLU events, they attend balls because she is a part
of the Women's Non Partisan Committee for the League of Nations,
and they also lobby to remove the American valuation clause
from the nineteen twenty two for Ney McCumber tariff bill.
This order they also were the first. They also worked
a lot with the NAACP, and they held the first
NAACP convention below the Mason Dixon line in Atlanta. So
there's kind of a progressive theme.
Speaker 1: There's this word that keeps that's it starts with an
s ends with an E. Subverse. Never mind, you can
keep going.
Speaker 3: It's really I mean, it's I mean, this is not
like I mean, I guess it sounds very trite nowadays,
like oh, this guy's wife like wouldn't change her name.
I mean, nowadays that's common, right, But it kind of
it blew my mind because I did all my other
research before I looked into his wife, and then it
blew my mind that his wife was the first prominent
American woman to not take her husband's name. And I
think it's insane that this man who was dating this
like really early radical feminist, is responsible for killing more
women by getting them to smoke and all these other things.
Like he makes his whole career off of manipulating especially
women's spending habits.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's.
Speaker 3: Crazy, insane stuff. But I digress. Here Brenez's rise to power.
The whole time he's doing this, He's not just going
from you know, it's not like a rags to riches story.
He's already at the top of his game. Right after
World War One, he had clients including President Coolidge. Funny
little story. You might know him as Silent cal Well.
People didn't really like Coolidge, so Edward Burnees goes to
the White House and offers his services in the early
nineteen twenties and lines up about thirty different celebrities and
takes pictures with them, and goes to all of his
media's friends because everyone wants to take pictures with the celebrities,
of course, and it's the big hot item. And now
you have this very sociable president allegedly. Imagine that kind
of power that you can do the public relations for
the President of the United States in your late twenties.
He has other clients though, Procter and Gamble, General Electric,
what would become CBS, Dodge Motors. One of the sources
that I read claimed that the Council on Foreign Relations
specifically installed him at CBS. And if you know anything
about CBS in the twentieth century, it was one of,
if not the most prominent television and radio media organization
in the United States.
Speaker 1: There's some very well there was only there was only
three TV stations at one point. It was just CBS,
ABC and NBC YAH and CBS even back then was
known as the CIA Broadcasting System. Well this is this
is this is pre CIA, but after the CIA comes in.
But it was pretty well known that intelligence worked through there.
Oh yeah, I mean I was an able intelligence and yeah,
places like that.
Speaker 3: You'll like my next example, because I to make a
brief digression, I always assumed that, like a lot of
the insanity that we perceive in this country started kind
of after World War Two, But reading this, it really
kind of resets that clock back a lot earlier. In
the nineteen twenties, Edward Brene's he starts publishing Freud's books
in the United States, and well, of course he's publishing
them in English, so he might as well be the
press agent. He might as well be the one promoting
them in the United States. And if you understand something
about Freudianism, it just took off. It became the hot
thing to do at parties. People at parties in the
United States, the Hoi poloi in the nineteen thirties, they
would have this whole They would psychoanalyze each other at
these parties that all have their orders, and they would
they would kind of play this not kind of game,
but they'd try to get each other to do a
Freudian slip. So if you had a Freudian slip in
front of your friends, you know, they would say, Aha,
you know you, it's actually expressed this desire. It became
kind of this fashionable and trendy thing to do. And
I thought that was kind of, you know, a cute
little anecdote. But when you begin to realize just how
much control that Brenees has over everything that's happening. He
singularly invented the concept of public relations, and all throughout
the twenties, thirties, and forties, he's establishing them at every
major university, at every major business, in every arm of
the government that he can approach, and he's marketing. It
is this science that's married with psychology, and it seeks
the truth the whole time. He's just gaining more and
more and more influence. Now, of course, you mentioned that
Burne's and the kind of tactics would later be used
by the CIA in the nineteen sixties and so on.
But a really interesting example I found was actually in
nineteen twenty and the first example of a Bernesian style
regime change was in Lithuania in nineteen twenty. And I'll
just read this quote from you and tell me if
this sounds familiar to you in the sense a Lithuanian
national Council was organized composed of prominent American Lithuanians, and
a Lithuanian Information Bureau was established to act as a
clearing house for news about the country and for special
pleading on behalf of Lithuania's ambitions. The Public Relations Council,
who was retained to direct this work, recognized that the
first problem to be solved was America's indifference to an
ignorance about Lithuania and its desires. When the Lithuanian Information
Bureau went before the press associations to correct inaccurate or
misleading Polish news about the Lithuanian situation, it came there
as a representative of a group which figured largely in
the American news for numbers of weeks. As a result
to the advice and activities of its public Relations Council.
They represented now to the State Department and appearing before
members of Congress as a spokesman for a country that
could no longer be unknown or ignored. Some people described
this campaign as the campaign of quote advertising a nation
to freedom. And one interesting thing about this example is
that when he's talking about the Lithuanians, you know, progressing
towards democracy, he notes that there's stiff political opposition within
Lithuania to this change in government, and that they just
have to be well, I mean realistically bulldozed by special
pleading in order to have their country changed and to
get rid of these things. And if you are familiar
with the CIA history, Burnet's helped found owned the United
States Information Agency and that did Radio Free Europe and
Voice of America and later on even I would say,
it's very timely with the disruption of USA that Trump
shut down recently. It's it's very apparent to me that
this tactic metastasized across all these different media platforms and
all these different countries. And it's you know that was
in nineteen twenty with Lithuania. It's been one hundred years
of running this tactic, all originated by Edward Burneze. And
I want to just draw up some other examples here.
Tobacco for example, well, I mean I brought up the
feminists supposedly smoking.
Speaker 1: But.
Speaker 3: People still were not buying as many cigarettes as he
would have liked. So in the nineteen twenties he created
an ad campaign called the Tobacco Society for Voice Culture
to quote help singers overcome voice irritation. And then of
course that's like his lobbying group that he's created that's
very passionate. They're all paid actors. And then he creates
this like fake ape, this fake supposedly neutral organization which
is also funded by him, called the Tobacco Information Service Bureau,
And the nature of the nature of how he conducts
his public relations bs is that he has this intense
activist group coupled with this supposedly informative organization that's neutral
and above it all, and he creates kind of this
entire artificial public square for these ideas supposedly to be debated.
But the whole show and every aspect of this group
is paid out by Brenees and picked up by other
public relations corps at different newspapers which are controlled by Brenees,
and they run advertisements with actors paid by Burnees, which
will publish reports from scientists that are paid by Bernees.
So when you consider everything from modern prescription medications to smoking,
to even people eating bacon for breakfast in this country,
it is all the direct result of campaigns that are
done by Edward Burnees. In nineteen twenty eight, he published
his book Propaganda Propaganda is a great book. If you
haven't read it, I mean you may have, but it's
it's phenomenal.
Speaker 1: It's really it's short too, it's very it's a very
easy read. There are whole sections that you will circle
so that you can come back to l Yeah, it's
a it's it's a it's required reading. Let's put it
that way.
Speaker 3: I'll just read you the first paragraph. The conscious and
intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the
masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who
manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government
that is the true ruling power of our country.
Speaker 1: I mean, well, while you're while you're reading that, let
me read the first paragraph of engineering the engineering of consent.
Because I do this all the time. I every once
in a while copy and paste and throw it up
on on X Freedom. Freedom of speech and its democratic corollary,
a freedom a free press have tacitly expanded our Bill
of rights to include the right of persuasion. This development
was inevitable, an inevitable result of the expansion of the
media of free speech and persue. All these media provide
open doors to the public mind. Any one of us,
through these media may influence the attitudes and actions of
our fellow citizens.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. And there's something that I noticed about these books,
the real evil here. When I was listening to the
first episode and reading through the sources, I initially thought
that this was prescriptive, as in, this was what he
thought the ideal mechanism should be for how to conduct
public relations. Albeit cynical, but just a sort of ideal.
This this is descriptive. There's a book I found from
nineteen forty seven, and it's just an anthology of every
single media appearance that the editors could get their hands on,
and it's five hundred different examples of Edward Burneze using
public relations as a tool for everything from milk to
the Hawaiian University, to dresses, to getting women to wear
different types of hats, to the propaganda offices in World
War Two. It's the same playbook over and over and
over again. This is prescriptive because at this point the
information and the tactics that he's doing, this is not
like a rise to fame. By the late nineteen twenties,
he's already in with the group. This is just the
material that's being spread throughout the the invisible government that
is the true rulling power of our country. This is
just the playbook that's being published for them so that
they can copy his successes. And he also sets a
lot of whatever you'd like to call them, new world order,
one world government. People like HG.
Speaker 1: Wells.
Speaker 3: What mister Wells says of political processes is equally true
of commercial and social processes and all manifestations of mass activity.
When the Constitution was adopted, the unit of organization was
the village community, which produced the greater part of its
own necessary commodities and generated its group ideas and opinions
by personal contact and discussion directly among its citizens. But today,
because ideas can be instantaneously transmitted to any distance and
to any number of people, this geographical integration has been
supplanted by many other kinds of grouping, so that persons
having the same ideas and interests may be associated and
regimented for common action, even though they lived thousands of
miles apart. And there's a separate take that I saw
from people that worked with Burne's in the nineteen twenties
of the nineteen forties, and they said that the way
that Berne saw people, the way that he saw humanity,
was not as like individual friends, or units, or ethnic
groups or religions or anything. He saw them only on
the scale of thousands of people. It's the only quantity
of humanity that he actually considered in his work, and
that really begins to show. There's other examples of this.
In July of nineteen twenty eight, he publishes in the
American Journal of Sociology what would later become Crystallizing Public Opinion,
but it was actually called in its first instance, manipulating
Public Opinion. The why and the how printed for private circulation.
Now here's a quote from it. Occasionally, the manipulation of
the public mind entails the removal of a prejudice. Prejudices
are often the application of old taboos to new conditions.
They are logical and hampering to progress. Take for example,
the feeling that used to exist against margarine. Today margarine
is made of pure vegetable ingredients that have been scientifically
determined upon as wholesome and past is pure by the government.
And well, let's posit something here, which is that if
you control the government, and if you control the industry,
and if you control, the scientific even the metaphysical concept
of consensus among institutions. If you directly control all of
those things, well, what if you're wrong? What if you're wrong?
What if the thing that you're trying to get rid
of and get out of people is not their prejudices
of old taboos to new conditions. What if Margarine isn't
good for you? What if what you're doing to people
isn't the truth. The scary thing about Brene's is, over
and over and over again, he's referring to his evil
mechanism as truth. That everything that a public relations department
will do is spread the truth to better inform people.
And that's not the quantity of material that he's producing.
It's not like an idle thing, and it's not even
believing his own bs. He really does think that this
is some ancient truth that he has discovered and that
if he's using it, it can never be wrong. He
never has regrets for his entire life on this until
the very end.
Speaker 1: But I'll save that.
Speaker 3: How does this work exactly?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 3: In a magazine called Public Utilities Fortnightly in November nineteen thirty,
he says, well, quote, there are psychological principles behind all behavior.
He who would influence or attempt to control behavior needs
to understand these principles too. Behavior is reciprocal. The public
attitude towards an organization reflects the organization's attitude toward it,
and that attitude must be expressed in acts, not merely word.
The public must be definitely guided in influenced toward the
desired actions. The public is not a mass in point three.
It is a series of interlocking groups with varying motivations
of molding different groups towards an end. The need for
skilled shaping of such a policy have created the profession
of public relations counsel and another thing to point out.
If he had just stuck to advertising, I mean, evil, manipulative,
but perhaps not so bad if it's getting people to
go and buy things. But he's not just convincing people
to go out to a store and buy products or
to follow trends. In nineteen thirty he is heavily involved
with a modern art movement, and he has personal correspondence
in association with Eleanor Roosevelt. He also is responsible in
nineteen thirty two and nineteen thirty six for the public
relations image of FDR. So all of FDR's fireside chats
Edward Burnet's right. Every fireside chat is started with the term,
my friends, what else is he doing in this time? Well,
there's some really strange thing. He's very in demand because
he's performing all these functions for all these people. Wealthy
public figures that hire him were persuaded to be photographed
in cheap hotels and ride buses. Luggage sales sword when
women were told to take at least three dresses on
a trip. More people bought bacon for breakfast when there
was a bacon's oversupply, and he had the pork sellers
wanted Burnets to start helping them sell more of it.
Speaker 1: He got.
Speaker 3: In nineteen twenty nine or so, he got Herbert Hoover,
the President, Henry Ford, and an elderly Thomas Edison for
the Lights Golden Chebilee event in Michigan. He also worked
for the Rockefeller Center to open construction sites for the
public view to help to help mitigate their public perception.
And in the nineteen thirties he writes, what was manipulating
public opinion, it now becomes crystallizing public opinion. He begins
to connect publicity in public relations.
Speaker 1: I don't know which one. I don't know which one
of those is worse. Manipulating is an action. Crystallizing is basically, look,
you're going to do it. It's done.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, Because at that point it was done. And
this next quote. Publicity became part of the machinery of
regulatory commissions set up under governments such as the Interstate
Commerce Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. It was used
by state governments and the administration of minimum wage laws,
especially in Massachusetts. It became part of the program of
municipal research leagues and principal cities, and it furnished the
basis of a movement for wide governmental control. And again
this is descriptive. This has already happened with FDR and
the New Deal, and this is a huge part of it,
exactly like you say, right, crystallizing it. It's settled, it's done.
And his whole like high and mighty attitude about this
really starts to become a problem in World War two.
So in June of nineteen forty one, he goes to
the I think it's the Institute of War Colleges, one
of these names, and he always has these great names
for what public relations should be called. They always sound,
you know, in our modern language, it sounds very like unbelievable.
There's no way they would call it. But this was
eighty years ago, so people were a little bit more
amenable to stuff like this in June of nineteen forty one. First,
a Morale Commission of experts advisors should be created to
drop a master plan for morale and psychological warfare. Second,
a program to strengthen faith in democracy. Third, a program
to strengthen democracy itself. A program to sell the army
to the people and the people to the army. What
this eventually becomes in World War Two is the Office
of War Information. In nineteen forty two, he addresses the
US Army quote, total warfare has three fronts, military, economic,
and psychological. And again total warfare, and you've covered kind
of the implications of that on your show previously. In
order to achieve total warfare, they must be integrated. It
is my thesis that the which censorship and psychological front
propaganda are so directly concerned, it's an agent of integration
which will strengthen the military and economic fronts and wield
all three into the necessary effective whole censorship should be
a function of the broad psychological front concerned with public
morale the widest sense. Today it's only military and leaves
the public in the middle. So he's expressly advocating for
psychological warfare and censorship to control the mindset of the
American people in World War Two. It's from a primary
source that he wrote for the US Army. But he
doesn't just stop with the kind of craziness there. Nineteen
forty five, he publishes a book that I couldn't find anywhere,
but it's I wish I could find a copy of it.
It's called Take Your Place at the Peace Table, which
advocates for the United Nations. It's quote a practical and
realistic guidebook to action on how to mold public opinion
and support of a in all caps here World Security Organization.
And I have a lot of books from the late
mid and late nineteen forties on world government's One World Order,
all that stuff. Burnet's method of doing this in this book,
and I can only find this in a secondary source,
is that everyone from the highest levels of government down
through Congress, down to your bowling club and churches can
become an activist to help preserve democracy and maintain the peace,
and advocate in terms of public opinion and support of
a world security organization. That's the purpose of the book.
So he also brags about his previous successes. He publishes
another book around this time called The Minority Rules, and
he cites himself. Another interesting literary example is the minority
movement of psychoanalysis, which, starting with a small group of
a dozen scientists in Vienna, why didened its influence in
larger and even larger circles until today the psychological novel, biography,
and history have all responded to its impulse. He's describing
it as though it's entirely separate from him, But he
had the sole publishing rights and was the press agent
for all of Freud's circle in Vienna. So he's again
descriptively bragging about a public relations success. He has some
very interesting thoughts on the minority of people, right, he
just kind of broadly labels them as intelligent. Intelligent people
are recognizing the difficulty of convincing the public of facts
that are against its own interests. In the active proselytizing
minorities in whom personal and public interests necessarily coincide lied
the progress and development of America, a lot of this
kind of wishy washy liberalism speak. Where does Okay, sorry,
I'm going chronologically here, so I might be a little disjointed.
Nineteen forty six, an interview with him and Eleanor Roosevelt,
who he was very close with, was published. He's interviewing
her as to whether there should be a Secretary of
public Relations in the cabinet of the United States, and
she says, yes, they need a peacetime agency in the
US that's comparable to the Office of Wartime Information. So
this lunatic, Edward Brenez, wanted to make this public relations
manipulation a cabinet level position. And he just continues on
with some other crazy stuff. Here he advocates for spam mail.
So you've opened your mailbox and there's advertisements in it,
and you might wonder, how does that start. Well, you see,
according to Bernez, who helped start this process, our civilization
is in a race between communication and that includes direct
mail and hyphens and chaos. We know that what we
call society is only a network of partial understanding held
together by communication, in which the mail plays an important part.
So he advocates for direct mailing of advertising. And that's crazy.
Now we get to nineteen forty seven where he publishes
the Engineering of Consent. Let's see here the last paragraph
of the Engineering of Consent. When the public is convinced
of the soundness of an idea, it will proceed to action.
People translate an idea into action suggested by the idea itself,
whether it is ideological, political, or social. They may adopt
a philosophy that stresses racial and religious tolerance. They may
vote a new dealer into office, or they may organize
a consumer's buying strike. But such results do not just
happen in a democracy. They may be accomplished principally by
the engineering of consent. Really just unbelievable stuff.
Speaker 1: Let's see here. Well, it's just so brazen in its openness.
And he knows that the only people who are going
to read this or elites and academics, and yeah, and
it just continues their reign absolutely.
Speaker 3: And he he's published in all of these different sources.
So he he's getting published by like, you know this,
like a magazine like Public Utilities, Fortnightly or Household Magazine
or whatever it is or New York or whatever. And
he knows how to tailor his message for each of
these publications because he's only ever thinking of them as
special pleading from special interests. So if you only think
of humanity right as just this block, it's just something
to be controlled. Let's see here in a for Household Magazine,
February nineteen forty nine, the article he wrote is why
we behave like inhuman beings? Thus, science, with its modern
equipment of experiment and method, is seeking to solve the
problem of inhuman behavior through greater and greater knowledge of
man in the world in which he lives, which, of
course prene controls. The key to our liberation from our
jungle heritage of force and fraud lies in accelerated self understanding.
The truth shall indeed make us free when we learn
with the same control we exercise over the physical nature,
that it must now be the truth about ourselves. He
also is in favor of this. Next one will lend
some credence, I think to the Wellington House rough Child
angle of it, nineteen forty nine. On British tariffs, America
must do her part two. From an economic angle. She
must lower tariffs if they keep out British goods. The
Britain produces better and cheaper. What the fuck in nineteen
forty nine could Britain have produced better and cheaper than
the United States? America must encourage rather than discourage British
insurance companies should encourage the torust traffic me than we do.
Must realize that shipping is a bridge forte. What the
US and Britain should create is a joint committee on
furthering common understandings. So a lot of this Anglo American
sentiment after the war something a little bit lighter in
nineteen fifty. And I want to add, after this point,
after the war, his power is total. He can advertise
and sell and do whatever the heck that he wants
because he's made all of the most powerful people in
this country absolutely insanely, ludicrously wealthy. And I'm not talking
about your old Anglo American aristocrats. I'm talking about your
late nineteenth early early twentieth century arrivals. He is a
nineteen fifty interview on how to be a public relations man,
and which is basically how to be a manipulative asshole.
Be open minded, simple, pathetic to the viewpoint of other fellows.
Don't sound off with your own views, or announce that
you won't listen to any argument, or show impatience with
views of others. Be tactful, objective, be diplomatic. If you
disagree with someone, let him know you respect his intelligence
and intentions. And when I start to see all of
these pr types of people, when I see kind of
the regime as it was constructed under the pandemic, and
also all of these other just ngo types, the way
in which these media types interact with each other and
they address the public, It's all directly out of the
Burne's playbook. It's nuts.
Speaker 1: Just gets me so.
Speaker 3: Angry, I mean, it continues on here. Another interesting view
on race from Edward Burnez nineteen fifty. He goes to
the University of Hawaii. What is he like about Hawaii? Well,
I'll list the points he says for you. Hawaii disproves
Soviet accusations that imperialism and racism are our national policy.
Hawaii dramatizes to the mainland that Americans of most diverse
backgrounds can live together in harmony. Hawaii demonstrates that all
of these people can successfully work out their destiny democratically.
For Hawaii to fully meet these goals, it would only
need a very slight change of attitude on the part
of a very small number of people towards the residual
problems discussed here. And you know, if you know anything
about about Hawaii, you know it's not quite that, not
quite that. In the nineteen fifties, this is an interesting
little thing here. He was the pr man for the
Aluminum Company of America, which they have a whole bunch
of I think it was it was a fluoride derivative,
like a stable form of florid that they had to
get rid of. So he then used the American Dental
Association to flori date the US water supply. That was
Edward Burnez, if you're wondering who did that. And the
interesting part about all these different ad campaigns and things
is they never get rolled back and they never get reconsidered.
Once something is in effect, it just is. The floridation
of the US water supply began seventy years ago, and
all because of one man, just to solve a temporary
problem of getting rid of a florid product. Let's see
nineteen fifty three, he writes a paper for the State
Department recommending setting up a psychological warfare office. Another interesting
thing he was doing during the early nineteen fifties, you know,
psychological warfare. You can associate with the CIA, but he
was the public relations council to the United Fruit Corporation.
They overthrew the government in Guatemala, and Brenees was responsible
for writing all of the propaganda that the CIA used
to do that.
Speaker 1: And you have to.
Speaker 3: Consider that when the agency finds a tactic that it
likes and is very effective and very covert, they're just
going to keep using it. And public relations by the
early nineteen fifties has really grown, really really grown fiscally.
Year nineteen fifty two, this is Brene's own figures, there
were approximately twenty six hundred full time public relations employees
on the payroll of the United States, plus another one
thousand who are working full time but in like a
part time pacelot. This does not include many individuals on
federal payrolls, for in many cases, the governmental departments, in
order to avoid public accusation that they are propagandizing, called
their public relations and public information employees by other names.
In certain cases, these men and women battle for public
opinion and appropriations. I asked the audience to consider the
latest USAID function in this context. With that information, let's
see going on here. These the United States had an
official propaganda agency that Edward Burnees ran between nineteen August
nineteen fifty three in October of nineteen ninety nine. This agency,
after its dissolution at that time, was directly superseded by
the Department of States Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Office.
It's just I mean so again, just at that fact
establishes direct continuity between Edward Burne's and our current leviathan
that Trump is dismantling. But I want to give a
little bit more of an inside view about Bernez. I
have an example here which will get kind of deep
under the skin of what this man was doing at
the government. Because to kind of just recap a little bit,
anyone who knows about Brenees knows about his role in
propaganda and consumerism. At the most shallow level, it's getting
people to buy things. At a deeper level, it's manipulating
people's consumer preferences. But one thing that people do not know,
and I'm about to bring light to, is what he
was doing within the federal government. And the source that
I use is an original primary source from nineteen fifty five.
It's a book called Billions, Blunders, and Bologney by a
man named Eugene Castle. Now you and I have never
heard of Eugene Castle because we're not ninety years old,
but edited by Castle Films was at the bottom process
of the title screen for most major films in the
United States in World War Two. Castle Films was the
sole distributor of propaganda to non theatrical audiences. That includes
all defense training films, all Army, Navy, and Red Cross films.
And this company, Castle Films, made over one thousand productions
during its tenure and was the largest non theatrical film
operation in the world at its time of existing. So
he wrote a book and he calls out the United
States Information Agency, which later becomes Department of State, which
later becomes the USAID, whatever propaganda head that's going on
in the federal government. Eugene Castle has seen and been
inside all of these things. And so I'm just going
to read this section in full, and I hope it'll
shed some light on mister Burne's direct quote here. Wasting
millions of dollars every year has become a fixed policy
and procedure with our propagandists in Washington again. The year
is nineteen fifty five ish. The US Information Agency does
not wait until June thirtieth, the date when Congress makes
its full appropriation available for the ensuing year. Six months
before the USIA is entitled to any new money, the
agency heads send urgent appeals to their employees scattered all
over the world to prompt them to quote, dream up
the biggest, most expensive projects they can conceive, and send
these post haste to Washington to enable the agency's directors
there to rush to Congress with an emergency appeal for
supplementary funds. These extra millions, supposedly to be spent for
promotional dreams abroad, invariably never go beyond the paper they
are written on. But the great money getting event is
the annual budget. Washington's big spending agencies carefully plan many
months in advance how to influence legislators to increase their
forthcoming budgets. A revitalized campaign to influence economy minded members
of the nineteen fifty five and nineteen fifty six Appropriations Committees,
and at the same time to lessen complaints from American taxpayers,
came into being with an announcement by Edward L. Bernaze,
freelance New York press agent, that he had formed a
committee of twenty eight persons to propaganda as the American
people into thinking well of the United States Information Agency,
never a shy one for personal promotion, Burnees appointed himself
both chairman and chief spokesman for the group, to be
known as the National Committee for an Adequate Overseas US
Information Program, with headquarters at the Burne's Publicity office in
New York. In a press release issued on Monday, October
twenty fifth, nineteen fifty four, the objectives of the committee
were defined as stimulating international understanding of America, counter acting
communist propaganda, and strengthening bonds with our allies. Chairman Burne's
further described as committee as an educational, non pressure group.
When asked by reporter Herald Touchings of the Chicago Tribune
whether the committee was formed to campaign for higher appropriations
by Congress, Brenees said that was not the plan. We
will not in any attempt, We will not attempt in
any sense to be a lobby, he said, But he added,
as far as I am personally concerned, one hundred million
dollars a year is an inadequate sum for this work.
Twenty four hours before the release of the Brene's announcement,
USIA Director Streibert, in an interview commending both himself and
his propaganda agency, which appeared in the Washington Sunday Star,
highly approved the objectives of the Brenees group. An excerpt follows.
Some members of the newly formed National Committee for an
Adequate United States Information Program, headed by public relations expert
Edward L. Brenees, feel the agency should have an annual
budget of one hundred and twenty five million dollars and
the director should have a cabinet status. When questioned about
this article, Brenees characterized it as quote extremely unfortunate, and
he added, makes it seem as if we're advocating a
doctor Gobbles for America. Let's see to do onward. Here
a lot of the blame. And this is like a
separate point now here before I move on to the
next point. Notice what he's doing here. He's using his
own public relations playbook of manipulation on Congress. It's no
longer about the American people. He's not trying to get
money for consumer products at this point. He is running
propaganda for his own propaganda agency at the government, not
only to establish himself as a cabinet level official, but
also to get twenty five percent more than he requests.
So it's this whole thing, excuse my language, is just
a fucking game for him. He creates a part as
an interest group, he creates his own status as the
chair of that group, and he has his own program
that he's managing, but will distance himself through several other proxies.
And he's also looped in the media to report on
it and hype each other up with these different organizations.
So by the time this whole carefully coordinated package gets
to Congress, it seems as though everybody in the world
wants this act to happen. And consider that amount of
money in twenty twenty five money, that one hundred and
twenty five million, well that's now one and a half
billion dollars. That is just for propaganda for the United States.
And we can we can disagree, not you and I,
but people can disagree with the anti communist activity and
propaganda that occurred in the nineteen fifties and how we
would combat Soviet influence all over the world. But this tactic,
this mechanism that Brene's is using continues on and is
used everywhere ubiquitously by the US government in order to
do all of its appropriations and to do all of
its lobbying, and to do all of its special pleading,
both externally around the world and internally within him within itself.
And that, in my mind, is insane, because Brene's never
shuts up in any of his works about how wonderfully
democratic all of this really is when he controls every
single aspect of what's occurring here. So I've been going there,
So any thoughts on that, Pete?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I mean I this couldn't be more timely,
right with everything that's happening, just to prove that this
didn't just happen like in the last ten years. This
wasn't because Obama came into office, and uh, what was
the What was the act that he overturned to it
allows the government to propagandize us? Was that smooth? Am?
I think it's smoot Holly? What the hell was that
thing called?
Speaker 3: H Why am I thinking, Oh, Smoot Holly is a
terriff act?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's well, forgive me. I have tariffs on
tariffs on the brain too.
Speaker 3: I think in the ninety six Clinton Telecommunications Act.
Speaker 1: That might uh, it was something else. I can't remember
the people who are listening or screaming screaming right now
that they know exactly what it is. But yeah, the
it's just one of those things where what you what
we think was has been created recently. This is This
explains why boomers are the way they are. This explains
why you know, no one we haven't had free thinkers until,
we haven't had people thinking outside of the box and
any kind of mass way until the Internet came along.
And now you can you have access to information that
they didn't have. And also you can there's alternative sources
of alternative outlets where people can get their news where
they can't really control this anymore, although they do. I mean,
obviously there's probably things that I say that we're in
a lab that I bought you know, we're created in
Probalyganda lab that I bought into and you know, just
just one of those things. You just got to be
as careful as possible. But yeah, I mean, more than anything,
it means this is not this is nothing new.
Speaker 3: The crazy part. I mean, when doing research for this,
it felt like I was going schizophrenic because all these
slogans that you think are just kind of happy American Indians.
Like one example, when it rains, it pours, well, that
was the nineteen thirteen Morton Salt Company slogan diamonds are
forever to beer's public.
Speaker 1: Relation to beers. You know. Oh, the the act I
was thinking of was a smith smith mount deck.
Speaker 3: Gotcha, let's see here, there's one less point and then
I have some like kind of meta perspective on this,
so you might have reached this point to your audience
where this man goes from a salesman a press stagent
and acquires and garners more and more and more political power,
and manipulates more and more consumer preferences and eventually is
able to manipulate the entire federal government to just give
him whatever money for whatever he wants. That's a pretty
meteoric rise to power. And he does actively maintain control
throughout his entire life. He lives to be one hundred
and three. So this goes into the uh, you know,
he was even still up involved into the campaign.
Speaker 2: Of George H. W.
Speaker 3: Bush and everything that I've mentioned here. The really crazy
insane part this is just expressly and explicitly what he
directly did in his life. Only him. That is not
to account for all of the different public relations departments
that now exist, all of the other highly intelligent people
that took his methods and put them to other evil uses.
And when you look at our media environment, I used
to say, Okay, well there's a lot of manipulation here.
It's only it's only Brene's. Everything that you're seeing was
thought up by Brenez or some second order effect the
focus group. This would eventually come out of the psychology
of it. And it just goes on and on and on.
And the thing I really hate about advertising is you
can't escape it. And it's it's so easy. You just
buy some ad space, right, So now there's really not
reason to.
Speaker 1: Have ads.
Speaker 3: Anyway, I'm getting a little bit into like what I
talk about later. I want to talk about the final
important point here, which is did this asshole ever feel
a little bit of remorse or a little bit of
moral compunction for his actions? Because his entire life he
really doesn't. And everything he writes from the nineteen tens
all the way until the nineteen nineties or so. In
nineteen ninety two, he writes one letter to a state legislature,
and what he writes in favor of is a bill
on the floor, and it's gonna sound psycho. He thinks
that public relations workers should have licensing. They should have
a license to be a public relations worker. That should
fix it, That should fix the entire fucked twentieth century
that you've almost single handedly created with your propaganda. You
just give all these people a license. I'll read a
direct quote here, and this, I think is as close
as you are going to get to a shred of
remorse for his actions at the end of his life.
And by the way, he's one hundred and one years
old when he's writing this, one hundred and one. Those
persons who heavily influence the channels of communication and action
in immediate dominated society should be held accountable and responsible
for their influence. In the case of public relations, where
millions of lives can be in jeopardy, no such requirement exists.
While in the field of medicine, the body is vulnerable,
in public relations, it is the mind. Ethical behavior needn't
be spelled out. There is no universal definition. Simply put,
standard Judeo Christian ethics based on integrity and honesty are
necessary for a public relations practitioner to properly practice his profession.
Doctors must take a Hippocratic oath upon entering their profession.
Public relations practitioners should do the same. So that's crazy.
That's crazy because this guy, this guy paid scientists and
doctors to make fake studies, to back up fake focus groups,
to back up fake newspapers, to get the American consumer
two start consuming by the God. I mean it's it's
it's an indirect effect.
Speaker 1: To become a to become a consumption society basically. And yeah, yeah,
I think it's great that even in his uh, I mean,
do we even want to call this amer kulpa he
uses he uses the propaganda terms Judeo Christian.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this guy's like, you know, I mean, oh
my god, and it's like so insidious. Okay, where do
I Where do I start on? Kind of the meta
of this. The meta of this is that he has
this weird god complex his entire life, where he determines
what truth is and that if there's just enough quote
information out there that people will somehow make whatever uninformed
decision is. But he's a very intelligent man. He wrote
tons and tons of books, and in all of his efforts,
occasionally I found and this is just the primary source references,
there's something like five hundred different articles, books, interviews, and
other media appearances that he advocates. He does some kind
of pr work for like a specific cause, like a
milk company or a public utilities company, or the military
or a college or whatever. Right, just hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds And these are just like the published ones.
The whole time, you know, sometimes he'll kind of throw out, well,
maybe propaganda can be used for evil, but mostly that's
just you know, mostly it's used for good when it
aspires to the truth, because it's for democracy. And the
whole time he's just throwing every every single time he's
he's using this mealy mouthed tactic when oh, well, okay,
people need to buy more milk. Well, in order to
buy more milk, you have to be a more well
informed consumer and a democracy, we have to reach a
consensus about the benefit of milk, and everybody involved in
the production and consumption of milk should work together, and
therefore we'll have a more informed society to consume our
products together. And this guy had the same I mean, really,
it's this mechanism that he's just taking and there's zero,
like you said right at the start, totally amoral. I
don't think he had like a crisis of conscious about this,
because there's televised interviews of him in nineteen eighty seven,
in nineteen ninety, in nineteen ninety two, they sit him
down with this lefty in nineteen ninety two, and he's
one hundred years old at this point, and yeah, the
lefty guys asking him like, well, you know, don't you
feel like a little bit bad that you've turned us
into this mass consumption society. And he says like, well,
you know, if it's for progress, if it's for democracy.
And I'm reminded of that book you went through a
little bit earlier. The true Believer, And the part that
like is really depressing is, uh, he used his uncle
Sigmund Freud's psychology to do all of this.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: He prayed on people, people's innermost fears and their insecurities
and you know, our people to just I can't put
it lightly. Our people, our grandparents, our parents, our great
grandparents lived in this world where this maniac could convince
them to do anything to buy anything, to go to
war for anything, to vote for anything. Public relations, as
I mean our Pentagon. Now every branch of the military
has a public relations department JD Vance Public Affairs, I
think in the Marine Corps, the White House Press Corps.
Another creation of public relations the White House Press Secretary.
And that's just this is all like the highest levels.
And nowadays you can't even think about it when there's
a scandal, when something goes wrong for your business. Let's
say you have a smaller, medium sized business. Two things
that you have to get in order to fight some
big problem, right, some big scandal. You have to get
a legal team, and you have to get a public
relations firm. And I kind of had this epiphany when
I was reading through and researching all this stuff. The
real reason that Trump got elected president, and the reason
a lot of people are just so I'm not even
gonna call it overdroid. They are righteously justified in being
gleeful that this apparatus is being dismantled is because you
can only manipulate and lie and fool and trick people
and take their money for so long. It's not this
infinite thing. I'm amazed that this manipulative playbook just happened
and was carried out for one hundred straight years, a
hundred years of just fooling the public and more and fooling,
I mean, giving them carcinogenic selling them carcinogenic products with
radium in it, and you know, carcinogenic seed oils and plastics,
and you know, you can do whatever you want to
people when you can control every aspect of their mind.
And you know, that's a great evil because it also
removes that the biggest evil of Brenees was not just
that he was doing it, not just that he was
inflicting all this evil upon all these people, hundreds of
millions of people around the world for one hundred years,
because by the way, this mechanism got exported through USAID
and all these other federal agencies and media and whatever else.
This went all over the fucking world to every other
country on the planet, starting with Lithuania in nineteen twenty,
Guatemala under Brenees in nineteen fifties or so. Right, this
goes everywhere. So it's not just a harm inflicted on
everybody on the planet, but it's also a really bad
part of it, a really dark part of it is
that the people that are committing the evil, the people
themselves that are doing the public relations and the public affairs,
and the propagandists. They're so far disconnected now from both
bernets and the tactics and the time in which this
originated that it's on the one hand, they don't feel
any connection to any of the evil that they do
because it's an institution that's been in effect for so long, right,
so they really don't even grasp how evil it is
to manipulate and to do public relations on the public.
But the more insidious angle is that, you know, they
think they think that it helps, they think they're doing
the public a service. There's not anything outside of this paradigm.
That's like the part that blows my mind with all
this public relations scrap. It's been so instituted at every
aspect of our society that we can't imagine a functioning
world without it. Right, the terms that we use gatekeeper,
Walter Lippman, stereotype Walter Lippman, you know, engineering consent. People
will say it's Chomski, it's Brene's, you know, the language
that we use, the way that we conceptualize it. Even
propaganda in public relations. The words the etymology of what
we say is outside of our control. It's baked into
how we speak to each other, even on the right.
And I I'm ranting a bit, but it just and
I did my best to like read right wing sources
as best as I could to help understand this, because
when I was doing my research on primary sources, and
I have a lot of original from the twenties through
the seventies or so original right wing books that were
published in hardcover, and I really failed to find much
on Burne's on public relations. Some of it's about propaganda,
but most of it was about communist propaganda. I found
a little bit on Freud and Burne's from John Murray
Cudhees The Ordeal of Civility about the Jewish struggle with modernity.
Another one that I read was A Barbarian Inside the
Gates by Don de grand Prix. He wrote a little
bit of his section on Edward Burne's and Walter Littman,
and he said it quote deals with manipulation of the
mind on a mass scale. And one person that I thought, well,
there's there's two more final quotes and these are by
right wing authors. So one is liberty or quality by
Eric von Khun outlet. It says a tempered, non hysterical
belief is also necessary in state and society. A sneering,
contemptuous attitude, pregnant with suspicion and animosities, is neither natural
nor constructive. It is moreover evident that sound hierarchies can
only be based on affection and reason. And then there's
a demeistra quote. No sovereign power is strong enough to
govern several millions of men unless it is aided by
religion or slavery, or both, and other recommendations. Watch the
nineteen seventy six film Network because people were aware of this.
A lot of the anti consumerists in this country was
actually carried on by the left. Now they do the
window dressing bullshit of saying it's all it's all capitalism,
it's all conducted by the bourgeoisie class of people, and
that the way out of this is establishing class consciousness,
and all that I think is crap, because this capitalism
and consumption that the left critiques so much about our
modern world was instituted by brenees. And there's an astonishing
amount of illiteracy about the specific people. This is what
the right has over the left. We know the names.
At this point of these people. We can take it
out of the realm of these abstract ideas and it
no longer has to be this kind of because when
you make a concept this is again even self referentially
a Bernesian thing. If you make something a consensus based
abstract concept that sounds reasonable and agreeable, they'll just trap
you in this paradigm like a rat in a cage
and thinking outside of it, thinking about you know, capitalism
is not this big nebulous thing. There are people, they
have names. These ideas didn't come from nowhere. It wasn't
because of a big mega corporation or because of a
robber baron which you've seen the Stormy episode. You know
that's pretty stupid. This advertising consumption based culture under Edward
Burnet's totally displaced the American aristocracy because these new people
that were instituting it in public relations of usually a
certain tribe or persuasion or at least a certain lack
of moral fortitude, they used it to seize power in
the United States, and they used it to circulate information
to each other. And again, I think researching the stream
drove me little Skitzo, because Brene's had his hand in everything.
It all goes back to him, and I think it's
very It's a breath of fresh air that Trump is
going after USAID. And as we learn more and more
and more about this, just how much of our money
was going to this stuff? You know, it helps answer
this central opinion, this central question that the right kind
of has. Now, why is all of our money going
to transgender Guatemalans or you know, all these other things,
all these other social causes in other countries. What the
hell is the point of all that? Well, it's because
if you can propagandize this sense sanity and make it
agreed upon, you can institute regime change or soft power
everywhere in the world with minimum investment, like you're opening
a new market for some tennis shoes. So anyway, I've
ranted long enough.
Speaker 1: No, that was that was great. I didn't want to
add something you were talking about like interviews, he did.
I've known this for years, I've h I used to
mention it all the time. April fourth, nineteen eighty five,
he was on David Letterman, The David Letterman Show. Really, yeah,
you did an eight eight minute segment on there, and
he was introduced as doctor Edward Burnees and he did here, yeah,
and he did that on purpose. And he came out
and one of the you know and letterman starts asking
about propaganda. He's like, well, you introduced me as doctor
or why would I have you introduce me as doctor?
Because it lends credibility. It's a propaganda device. It's amazing.
It's on YouTube. It's eight minutes on YouTube.
Speaker 2: Oh it's nuts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean the guy was like totally you know,
in a weird you know, you got to respec I
don't want to say respect it, but I'm just kind
of an awe of how freaking good this guy was
a manipulation, like the devil himself. It really like, uh,
and you can the reason I kind of stayed away
throughout most of this talk from a lot of the
rough Child stuff and Wellington House and Tavistock Institute or
whatever else, is because you don't need you don't even
need to like get that far it deep into it
to understand why it's evil. It's it's not evil because
it's I mean, yes, it is heavily involved with some
of the worst people to ever live on the face
of the earth. But more importantly, the mechanism itself is dehumanizing,
it's brainwashing, it's and I also think it's important to
talk about this because, like you say earlier, we're moving
into the real Internet age, right, the real result of
a change of the inability of the elite to manage
opinion and consensus and to drive narratives out. And I mean,
I'm approximately thirty, and I'm realizing that people younger than me,
they didn't grow up in the same world that I think.
Not not to say you and I did, but I
remember a world of the internet, sorry, remember a world
of radio, and a world of television and newspapers, physical
hard newspapers and periodicals. And even though I was a
young kid at the time, there was nothing outside of it.
You know, if you controlled those mediums, you controlled everything.
And you know, it enables you to pull these global
scale cons like the Warning Rock or you know, you
can convince the entire world that two thousand and eight
was because of you know, some prime mortgage market, or
you can run with whatever narrative that you want to.
Speaker 1: And uh, I.
Speaker 3: Think that's that's increasingly you know, and I think the
coup de gras on all of it, right, the kind
of final, the final, the last Bernesian move that will
ever be made as a prediction in his style and
his manner of doing things was COVID, the COVID pandemic,
the slogans, the consensus, the engineering of consent, the manipulation,
the limiting of people's paradigms and their ability to consume information.
That that used all of the Brene's playbook. And I
think this country is just done one hundred straight years
of being propagandized for everything, for every foreign war. And
I think the people, I mean, we've just had enough.
And the liberals like they're never they're really not getting it.
They're not understanding it because they don't have the same
critical perspective on it. Right, They've been the beneficiary of
the Burne's techniques for one hundred years, I mean, and
it's you know, to disprove anyone who might have a
notion to the contrary. Starting out in nineteen nineteen, Brene's
wife was a progressive, the first woman to not change
her name on a US passport ever, ever, and advocated
for ACLU and held a NAACP event below the Nason
Dixon Line and the Women's not partisan Committee for Intervention,
you know, joining the League of Nations. So it's a
progressive tool and operation and mechanism for one hundred years,
right back to the very beginning, and same thing with
the US Information Agency, and it's always been used by
this power structure to maintain control from the start to
the finish. So, like you were saying at the very start,
it's not something with it's not something that began under Obama.
It's not something that began with nine to eleven. Sometimes
the left will run with that. The Century of the
Self documentary, it does a good job in the first
episode explaining Brene's but it veers into like Freudian ego
psychology and a lot of the hippie movement and other stuff,
and that's another very different angle. Like people took it
wasn't just Brene's. It took freud and use that to
just well, I guess if Stormy's listening, I think to
get demons to possess people two make them do things
like join cults and release subconscious forces as some kind
of healing mechanism. You know, when you have that power
over somebody, it's a complete intoxication. And another evil thing
I think is he was so frequently in his lifetime
saying that we need total one world governance, or we
need to make the world safe for democracy, or that
it's enlightening people. He's speaking with such certainty as this
positive thing is. He's destroying the world. Really, I just
this is liberalism's legacy. The one another little point I'd
like to make is that Nazi propaganda ended at Nuremberg,
Communist propaganda ended when the wall fell in ninety one
or so, and later on then Liberalism's propaganda never fell.
This is something people forget. There's not a moment in
time really up until January of this year where the
propaganda tactics and the establishment of the regime's self perception
and its mechanism in the burnet style was ever under
real serious scrutiny or dismantling. Every single president from nineteen
twenty to twenty twenty upheld this tactic of things, this
public relations attitude. It was on every the Nielsen readings
in every television system in America relied upon this that
you could just focus group your way into getting people
to consume information in the manner that you like, and
it's it's why. Also the regime in a bigger sense
continues to rely on more conventional legacy media news organizations
like CNN, MSNBC late night shows. These were the mediums
that they dominated ever from, like ever since, like the
sixties and seventies, for fifty straight years. This was their
mechanism that they could use to control and sway public opinion.
And when you use a mechanism continuously for generations, I'm
reminded of another thing Stormy said, because he has a
lot of great insights, the people that grow up now,
they don't understand the original intention of this system or tactic.
They only they only know how to like move the
lever a little bit and to manipulate factors and dynamics
in it just just just a twitch. But they don't
really know why it's in place, right. They kind of
have heard the slogan, well, we're going to use public
relations to better our democracy, and uh, you know, for
Brene's and his ILK, that meant something very specific, that
you're trying to move towards a specific way of consumption
and a specific way of having people relate to science
and technology and the productive factors behind their consumer goods
and also their politics. It was a very specific, laid out,
established relationship. The other thing to consider is that people,
when this propaganda was in its early fifty years or so,
why wouldn't you trust.
Speaker 1: The Uh what was it?
Speaker 3: If you know, it sounds very quaint now because we're
very cynical and hip to this. But if something comes
up and says, well, what was it the tobacco thing?
Uh did you do? If something says it's like the
Tobacco Safety Health Coat Commission or something, people believed that that.
People really thought that when you know, a scientist or
a doctor was putting out their seal of approval on
a on a consumable good, that it meant something. Right,
people when they saw that cottonseed oil was safe for
consumption and radium products were safe to use in your home,
well fuck it. You know you use it and then
you develop cancer because of it. And another thing about
Brenees is that he also advocated for prescription drugs and
the same consensus building, so to speak, mechanism in the
sale of drugs. So that's why in this country you
see ads for boner medications on TV because Edward Brenez
wants you to be a well informed consumer. And all
these different prescription medications then lead to just but it's
not consensus that it leads to. You know, the last
thing I'll say to like bring it up out of
the twentieth century into the twenty first is the society
that this was being performed in was like ninety five
percent wide or something, or you know, just overwhelmingly, you know,
And if the race isn't your thing, then it's it's
a stable, homogeneous, economically prosperous society in which you can
engineer things in tweak variables and expect a relatively predictable result.
Another reason, in addition to the information age, that this
stuff becomes so unpredictable is that the people conducting the
propaganda are not using it for the benefit even of
the consumer or the target audience or whatever right they begin.
Instead of being a special pleading of a special interest
of one particular group towards a broader generalized audience, the
engineering of consent is a self referential feedback loop where
the special pleading from the special group will be for itself.
It'll market to itself and forget the need to appeal
to a broader generalized audience. I think this is the
explaining factor as to why aggressive propaganda I think generally,
beginning in the Obama administration, failed to appeal to the right,
not just because the right grew wiser to it, but
because the left forgot how to speak to a generalized audience.
They forgot that they had to engineer the consent, and
they just thought that they already had the consent. I
think Distributist said this on his latest appearance, that the
left forgot how to The left forgot to speak to
anyone outside of its own echo chamber, and that losing
that was losing their greatest possible strength. To say the
Brene's quote again, like you need to engineer consent to
get racial and religious tolerance, to vote a new dealer
into office, or to organize a consumer's buying strike. So
you need to engineer the result that you want. You
can't just expect it to happen because you put propaganda
into effect. When people simplify Brenes's method into propaganda, that's
something as simple as a poster. But Brenees's propaganda was
not just putting a single piece of media out there.
It was a whole It is really a whole system
of controlling every aspect.
Speaker 1: So like.
Speaker 3: You know, to give a very fast example, you walk
into your local grocery store and you want to get
a jar of pickles. You don't know which pickle to choose. Well, okay,
you can pull up in your local You can pull
up on your local coupons and see which one is
the cheapest. You can make an informed decision by looking
at the ingredients list, and you can talk to a
cashier and who knows the stock and knows what goes
quickly right. That actually is an informed consumer of a product.
Who will go and do that. That is your hippie mom.
These are your home birth anti vax types. These are
people that are really behind the RFK types. I think
are people that truly want to be informed Americans in
the more classic pre twentieth century definition of the word,
when that was the style of advertising that was conducted,
that a product was sold on its merits to the consumer.
If you want to by that same jar of pickles
in Sicco brenee world, you get some stupid ad on
YouTube and you are you know, propagandized by the pickle
jar itself telling you that scientist says that it has
I don't know, I'm mixing examples, but like lower cholesterol,
like cerials have lower cholesterol according to scientists, and that
anybody with some sense realizes that a lot of those
things are fake anyway, and that it's put on your
TV in fakeness, and it's put on your computer screen
by fakeness, and when you see it in the store,
you're not perceiving your product that you're about to purchase
as an informed consumer, but you're seeing like the mechanism,
the manufactured consent right in front of you and the
product that you consume, and it makes you I mean,
I don't say this in disparaging way, it makes you
a mindless consumer instead of a conformed, informed consumer. And
we've also lost status symbols in this system because part
of Burne's success in advertising products was he would determine
fashion trends. Product placement in movie and TV shows is
directly I mean Brene's in the nineteen twenties and thirties
would do product placement and he would choose specific celebrity.
He had total control over media production in order in
order to do this, and nowadays there's not this cultural
mass man ecosystem where you are in your mass urban
society and you're talking with all of your friends, and
the consensus has been established among your friends because your
friends have consumed the same media, and that you have
all seen the science or the authoritative reports, or that
you've read the local newspaper articles, which I'll tell you
that this product is a good idea. It's not this
centralized manipulation. People lived these atomized, decentralized lives. So even
the style in which Brenets relies upon the mass man
can't be replicated anymore. People are no longer these large,
homogenized blocks that have stable associations and live in one
place for their whole lives. And we now live in
a world of great transience, and the manipulation just adds
so much insult to injury. I think it's long overdue
for Trump anyone, I mean anyone to go through and
question all this stuff. The left after the nineteen nineties
totally seeded their ground to criticize capitalism at all. Right,
they gave up the ghost and occupy Wall Street twenty eleven.
In my lifetime as an adult, and since that point,
you know, and twenty elevens fourteen years ago, the consumption element,
the consumer element, that the protesting of this Spernasian system,
like the left has gone the opposite direction. They've been
totally in bed with corporations and the manipulation and benefiting
from this system. And any real I wouldn't call it
an anti corporate but any anti consumption or anti manipulation
or anti propaganda perspective or credibility the left ever had
was just completely lost. One of their last things about Brenez,
people might wonder about his partisan leanings. Definitely he was,
but whenever he would write pr articles, one of them
from the mid nineteen forties says that we need to
very closely manage perception and I think it was wages
and consumer options so that we don't get too radical
of a response from either the right or the left.
Right that we just kind of get this frozen stasis.
Let's see, I'm kind of all over the place. There
any any thoughts, Pete.
Speaker 1: No, I think you know, I think what you've stated
in the last Uh, this last section here is perfect
to end one. There's really not. I mean, we keep
talking about this all night, and uh, I think the
points you've made already or are perfect and will give
people a lot to think about. There's enough information on
him out there. And plus the books are easy to read.
I mean you can pick up prop again and you
can pick up Crystallizing. You can read both of those
books in a couple of days if you're if you're
someone who doesn't have a lot of time to read,
you can still get through Room in a few days.
But and there's video, you know, Like I said, there's
video out there so you can hear the man talk
and that'll give you a good sense of him as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, the Adam Curtis documentary on him. But most of
the research, if it wasn't the physical books, I was
using a archive dot org. I mean, you can find
all of his stuff. They're all the interviews with him.
It's all straight out of the horse's mouth, like none,
none of what I was saying was really hyperbole, Like
this is all explicitly stuff that he's stated in interviews
or books, which makes it all the more evil.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, well let's wrap this up. Yes, sir,
promote your promote your YouTube channel that's in stasis.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've deserved that one. Filo Smithcellani. You can find
me on YouTube, I will put out more content.
Speaker 1: I swear, don't don't ask. Don't ask for social media.
He's not on social media. He's a smart one. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I do my best to anonymiuze myself. Yeah, thank you
for having me on. I really, I really appreciate it.
And uh, I hope to bring more light to these
forgotten not so forgotten figures soon.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I would I tease you about the
YouTube channel, but you do tons of research before you
come on the show, and you I appreciate you putting
your time into that so that you know, so you
can come here and educate on some figures that people
don't know about. I think this was a great little uh,
like three great episodes in a row, covering Bernard Rouke,
James forrestall and and mister Burnet's because he this is
I mean, it's just studying those three is just a
picture of the twentieth century.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the world we live in now I think
is totally incoherent without understanding the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: Well, hopefully we're we're on the path to destroying the
twentieth century and leaving.
Speaker 3: It behind something anything new.
Speaker 1: All right, fil us. Thank you. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Thank you appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Pete