Ep 7 | Redefining Truth: The Man Behind the Rise of 'Expert' Propaganda | The Beck Story

This episode explores the pervasive influence of Edward Bernays on public manipulation, delving into his life, strategies, and the broader implications of his work.

1. Edward Bernays pioneered the public relations industry using psychological principles to influence mass behavior.
2. His strategies often involved enlisting experts to legitimize products and ideas, profoundly shaping public perception and behavior.
3. Bernays’ tactics were influential in political realms, aiding in coups and governmental policies by controlling information.
4. Modern parallels are drawn to show how Bernays' techniques continue to influence public relations and governmental strategies today.
5. The episode highlights ethical concerns about the manipulation of public opinion and its implications for democracy.

1: The Birth of Spin

Explores Bernays' early life and career, showcasing his unique approach to public relations. Edward Bernays: "Only through the active energy of the intelligent few can the public at large become aware of and act upon new ideas."

2: Campaigns that Changed America

Details Bernays’ iconic campaigns, including the popularization of bacon and eggs as an American breakfast. Edward Bernays: "4500 physicians urge heavy breakfast to improve health of American people."

3: Influence on Global Politics

Discusses Bernays' role in political manipulations, such as the 1954 Guatemalan coup. Edward Bernays: "The techniques can be subverted for anti-democratic purposes as effectively as they are employed for socially desirable ends."

4: Legacy and Modern Relevance

Analyzes the lasting impact of Bernays’ methods on contemporary public relations and government propaganda. Speaker A: "A remarkably consistent through line extends from the original progressive movement right through to the actions of left-wing elites today."

• Question the source and intent behind the information you consume.
• Recognize the use of expert endorsements in media as a potential tool for manipulation.
• Educate yourself on historical instances of media manipulation to better understand its modern forms.
• Foster critical thinking and verify facts before forming opinions.
• Engage in open dialogues to challenge and understand different viewpoints.

In 1990, Life magazine named Edward Bernays on its list of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th century. Yet few Americans have ever heard of Bernays. He was an early innovator in the field of public relations who pioneered techniques of mass manipulation that, among many things, altered the consumer habits of Americans and even toppled a Central American government. This final episode of Season 1 examines how Bernays helped create the progressive deference to experts in government, which also created a larger culture of experts affecting — and often manipulating — all areas of our life.


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People

Edward Bernays, Bill Clinton

Companies

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Books

"Crystallizing Public Opinion" by Edward Bernays

Guest Name(s):

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Content Warnings:

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Speaker A
It was January 1998. A movie called WAG the Dog was released in us theaters. It was directed by Barry Levinson. And it's a fictional story of a president embroiled in a sex scandal during an election campaign.

To distract the nation from the scandal, a White House spin doctor recruits a Hollywood producer to help create a fake war in Albania.

Speaker B
There's a crisis in the White House. What's the crisis? And the president's top advisors have been called together. Oh, jeez.

Speaker A
The sexual misconduct occurred inside the Oval Office. With the election only days away, how much will this scandal affect the outcome? The president spent the weekend pressing the flash. He wasn't campaigning.

Speaker C
He was dating, actually.

Speaker B
Now Washington's top spin doctor.

Speaker A
We can distract the press for eleven days till the election. I think we got a chance.

Speaker B
Has an idea we can't afford a war.

Speaker A
We're gonna have the appearance of a war.

Speaker B
But he can't pull it off without Hollywood's top producer. Do I know you?

Edward Bernays
We have some mutual friends in Washington.

Speaker B
Why come to me? We want you to produce. You want me to produce your war? Not a war.

Speaker A
It's a pageant. We need a theme, a song, some visuals. The president's gonna go to war with Albania in about 30 minutes.

Speaker E
Wag the dog.

Speaker A
It was supposed to be a satire of presidential politics. But while the movie was still in theaters, this happened.

Speaker B
Good evening, I'm Martin Lucevich. Good evening. I'm Joey Chen, and this is the world today. First up, bombshell. Allegations rocked the White House in Washington this evening. Supporters of the president are reeling at issue whether Mister Clinton had a sexual relationship with a former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and whether he conspired with his close friend, Washington attorney Vernon Jordan, to convince her to lie about it under oath.

Bill Clinton
But I want to say one thing to the american people.

I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

I never told anybody to lie. Not a single time. Never.

These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the american people.

Speaker A
Eight months later, in August 1998, President Clinton changed his tune about the nature of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky in a televised address to the nation.

Bill Clinton
In a deposition in January, I was asked questions about my relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information.

Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.

In fact, it was wrong.

It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.

Speaker A
Then, just three days later, on the same day that Monica Lewinsky wrapped up her testimony before a grand jury, President Clinton returned to the airwaves with this announcement.

Bill Clinton
Good afternoon.

Today I ordered our armed forces to strike at terrorist related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan because of the imminent threat they presented to our national security.

I want to speak with you about the objective of this action and why it was necessary.

Our target was terror.

Our mission was clear to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Usama bin Laden, perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today.

Speaker A
Americans could not help but draw the comparison between the comedic setup of WAg the dog and the very real scenario unfolding at the Clinton White House.

Surely the president of the United States wasn't actually using military action to create a diversion from his latest extramarital affair.

But for the next few weeks, video rental stores had to scramble to keep up with the customer demand for copies of Wag the dog.

Incredibly, four months later, in December 1998, just as impeachment proceedings against Clinton began in the us house, the scenario happened again.

Bill Clinton
Good evening.

Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq.

Speaker A
Maybe the Wag the dog similarity was just a total bizarre coincidence.

But how could anybody tell for sure after these weird coincidences, the director of WAg the Dog, Barry Levinson, was asked about the kind of real life manipulation that his movie jokes about.

Barry Levinson
I do think it's the, it is more the media in terms of how much manipulation is taking place on a day to day basis and to the point that we no longer are quite sure where reality is and those things which are fabricated.

And it gets to be a, I think, more sinister as time goes along, because you'll be able to do even more things, as we allude to in the movie, by, you know, digitally putting someone in another environment, so that if seeing is no longer believing, then where are we? And then we're really left to our own sense of morality. And how far does that play out?

Speaker A
In an interview at the time, NBC Nightly news anchor Tom Brokaw commented on the similarity between politics and entertainment.

Speaker B
Well, I think politics and the entertainment industry are similar. It's a lot about power.

It is, pardon me, a lot about vanity.

It is as well a lot about manipulation, about mass audiences and getting them to see your point of view.

And it's a lot about being a star.

It's a lot about who can light up a room.

Speaker A
Barry Levinson and Tom Brokaw both mentioned the idea of manipulation in those clips.

They were speaking in the late 1990s and Americans were already cynical about spin more than 25 years later. We're now used to spin all the time.

It's so persuasive now in our government and culture that for probably most Americans, their default position is to assume that the initial messaging from almost any institution, especially government, is spinning. How did we get here?

In this final episode of season one, I want to take a look at how the progressives deference to experts in government also created a larger culture of experts affecting and even manipulating all areas of our life.

And there is probably no individual more responsible for developing the wider culture of manipulation expertise and spin about that expertise than a 20th century progressive named Edward Bernays.

Ever wonder why things are the way they are in America?

Welcome to the Beck story, my podcast on how our past informs our present. How did we get here? Well, this first season is about how a cult of expertise developed in America, how it permeated our government, and how this allegiance to so called expertise has far reaching implications for our nation right now.

A remarkably consistent through line extends from the original progressive movement right through to the actions of the left wing elites today.

Why are bacon and eggs such an indelible part of breakfast in America?

Well, two words, Edward Bernays.

In the 1920s, Bernays was a young publicity man trying to get his own business off the ground. Publicists, or press agents as they were often called, were not new. But the Bernays approach was new. He thought much further outside the box than most of his peers in the industry.

The Beechnut packing company hired Bernays to help boost their sales of bacon.

Well, Bernays did some research and it indicated that most Americans at the time ate a very light breakfast, often little more than toast, juice and coffee. So his idea was not to simply come up with an ad campaign for bacon, but to actually try to alter the breakfast eating habits of the entire nation.

Bernays approached a well known doctor in New York and asked if he would endorse a letter to doctors across America, polling them on which was healthier, a light or hearty breakfast.

Here's Bernays recounting the story. In 1991, when he was 100 years.

Edward Bernays
Old, we carried out a letter to 5000 physicians.

Obviously all of them, we got about 4500 answers.

All of them concurred that a heavy breakfast was better for the health of the american people than a light breakfast that was publicized in the newspapers. Newspapers throughout the country had headlines saying 4500 physicians urge heavy breakfast in order to improve health of american people.

Many of them stated that bacon and eggs should be embodied with the breakfast and as a result the sale of bacon went up.

Speaker A
His strategy totally changed breakfast in America and made bacon sales soar for his client without even publicizing the beach nut company as part of the strategy.

In his biography of Edward Bernays titled the Father of Spin, Larry Tighe says, quote, hired to sell a product or service, Bernays instead sold whole new ways of behaving which appeared obscure but over time reaped huge rewards for his clients and redefined the very texture of american life.

This became a pattern for Bennaez in the way of manipulating public opinion, using perceived experts like doctors and scientists to endorse and help disseminate viewpoints that his clients wanted the public to accept.

In his 1928 book propaganda, Bernays wrote.

Edward Bernays
Quote, only through the active energy of the intelligent few can the public at large become aware of and act upon new ideas.

Speaker A
The active energy of the intelligent few, the expert elite.

This is still the idea at the core of progressivism today.

Edward Bernays. He was born in Austria in 1891. He was the middle of five children and the only boy.

His uncle was the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.

Bernays mother was Freuds sister and his fathers sister was Freuds wife.

When Bernays was one year old, his family immigrated to New York City.

In 1912, Bernays graduated from Cornell University with a degree in agriculture. He never wanted to be a farmer, but his father insisted he study agriculture. When Bernays graduated he took a job writing horticultural articles for a publication called the National Nurserymen.

Shortly after that he was invited by a high school friend to help run a magazine for doctors called the Medical Review of reviews. Bernays never even came close to farming. His early experience working for these magazines hooked him on publicity and persuasion.

When Bernays and his friend published a doctor's positive review of a play called Damaged Goods, it spun his career and his life in an unpredictable direction.

The play was about a very taboo subject at the time, sexually transmitted disease.

After learning that a famous actor, Richard Bennett, was interested in producing the play in New York, Bernays approached Bennett with an offer to help.

Well that offer soon escalated to Bernays trying to raise funds to produce the play.

Having no real money to chip in himself, Bernays devised a plan that would become a go to for him. Throughout his career he turned the play into a cause.

In this case he made the cause about public sex education.

Bernays created a front organization called the Sociological fund. The publicity he whipped up attracted the wealthy donors like John D. Rockefeller, junior Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. And Bernays novel plan worked. The money poured in and the play was a giant hit.

Bernays success promoting the damaged goods play was quickly followed by an even greater challenge. Selling America on multi city tours for a russian ballet company and an italian opera singer named Enrico Caruso.

Well both were huge surprise successes thanks to his willingness to push boundaries. He had one of the female stars of the russian ballet photographed at the Bronx zoo wearing a tight fitting gown with a snake draped over her shoulders. The racy photo made front pages all across the country.

You see Bernays had a real knack of grabbing the public's attention.

World War one paused Edward Bernays rising star. But the war ended up being a huge part of his story because it taught him all about propaganda.

On the day the US declared war on Germany Bernays tried to enlist in the army. But he was rejected because of his bad vision and flat feet. Instead he pulled strings and used his charm to get a job with CPI, the committee on public information that was the propaganda arm of the Woodrow Wilson administration headed by George Creel.

At the CPI, Bernays honed his persuasion skills by helping design messaging to win support for the war effort from pacifist Americans as well as from citizens of multiple foreign nations.

When the war ended, Bernays was part of President Wilson's delegation to the Paris Peace conference where Bernays job was to publicize Wilson's post war aims and ideals. Here's Bernays again speaking in 1991 at.

Edward Bernays
The age of 1926.

I was in Paris for the entire time of the peace conference that was held in the suburb of Paris and we worked to make the world safer. Democracy. That was a big slogan.

Speaker A
Bernays later wrote that through World War one experience he discovered that arms and.

Edward Bernays
Armaments are not the only weapons, that ideas are weapons too.

Nations recognized in varying degree the importance of a scientific approach to the marketing of national aims and of national policies.

Speaker A
Observing firsthand how effective propaganda was during wartime, Bernays was inspired by the potential of propaganda in peacetime.

Edward Bernays
He wrote, quote, world War propaganda showed the possibilities of molding public opinion towards an objective.

Speaker A
After the great war Edward Bernays sprang into action. He married his longtime close friend Doris Fleischman and together they started their own firm.

Feeling that the word propaganda was now too tainted of a word to describe the work that they did, they took to calling it council on public relations.

Though many disputed his claim, over the years Bernays always promoted himself as the inventor of modern public relations.

Whether he legitimately invented it or not. He did teach the first ever pr course at New York University in 1923. And that same year he wrote the first book on the practice of public relations titled crystallizing public opinion.

Bernays was a genius self promoter. But it wasn't all hubris he delivered for his clients. In the early 1920s, as bobbed hairstyles became fashionable for women, the Vanita Hairnet company hired Bernays to help their slumping sales. Bernays once again looked to experts, in this case labor leaders.

He convinced them of the importance of women factory workers wearing hair nets around machinery for their own protection.

He then got health officials across the US to make food service workers wear hair nets as well.

By the end of Bernays campaign several states passed laws requiring women to wear hair nets under certain work conditions.

It was another bacon and eggs type victory for Bernays.

He created a safety culture around hairnets and a new demand for them without ever having to promote his client.

As Bernays described it in his book crystallizing public opinion, the Council on Public.

Edward Bernays
Relations, after examination of the sources of established beliefs must either discredit the old authorities or create new authorities by making articulate a mass opinion against the old belief or in favor of the new.

Speaker A
Business absolutely boomed for Binet's PR firm.

His client list soon included General Electric, Procter and gamble, CB's, NBC, Time magazine, General Motors, Philco, Westinghouse and hundreds of others.

He earned the modern equivalent of several million dollars a year. An article about Bernays in the Atlantic described him as, quote, small of stature, careless in his dress, not always even newly shaved. He resembles a rather diminutive, absent minded professor more than an alert businessman, end quote.

But the pope of propaganda as another journalist dubbed him, was wildly effective. He increased the sales of ivory soap by focusing on making bath time fun for kids and sponsoring a long running salt sculpture contest with cash prizes.

He made Dixie cups a household name by setting up one of his front organizations called the Committee for the study and promotion of the sanitary dispensing of food and drink.

That campaign emphasized that disposable cups were the only true sanitary way to drink.

He also helped make jello popular as a dessert. He helped popularize greeting cards. He was the pioneer of product placement in movies. I'm sorry, you're saying you want us.

Jen Easterly
To use the show to sell stuff?

Speaker A
Look, I know how this sounds. No, come on Jack, we're not doing that. We're not compromising the integrity of the show to sell.

Edward Bernays
Wow.

Speaker A
This is diet Snapple.

Edward Bernays
I know. It tastes just like regular Snapple doesn't it?

Speaker A
You should try plummer granite.

Speaker B
It's amazing. I only date guys who drink Snapple.

Speaker A
Look, we all love Snapple. Lord knows I do. But focus here.

He even boosted book sales on behalf of major publishers by getting contractors and architects to build bookshelves in houses and apartments since as he later wrote, quote.

Edward Bernays
Empty bookshelves induced book purchases.

Speaker A
As biographer Larry Tighe puts it, Bernays was quote, part Pt Barnum, part JP Morgan and blended in a way that was uniquely El Bernays.

In 1924 he got a call from the White House. Calvin Coolidge was running for reelection and he had a public image problem.

Americans perceived him as dour and boring. Theodore Roosevelt's daughter quipped that Coolidge looked as if he had been weaned on a pickle.

Well here's Brene's in 1989 at 97 explaining that you never combat a rumor with a denial.

Edward Bernays
The denial of a rumor is a question as to which side to believe. And many people would not believe denial.

But what you do with a rumor is to blanket a rumor.

One way to blanket any rumor is to develop what the social Scientists call an overt act.

Speaker A
The overt act that Bernays came up with to boost Coolidge image was a pancake breakfast at the White House with entertainers and celebrities from Broadway and Hollywood.

After breakfast in front of the president and assembled guest Al Jolson sang a campaign song titled Keep Coolidge. The press ate it up.

Here's Bernays recalling the event in 1991.

Edward Bernays
Next day every newspaper in the United States had a front page story.

President Coolidge entertains actors at White House.

And the Times had a headline which said president nearly left.

Speaker A
Just a few weeks later, Coolidge was reelected in a landslide.

Bernays talked and wrote a lot about what he called the engineering of consent.

That is, getting the public to consent to whatever he wanted for them on behalf of his clients. Be it a program goal or even an attitude about something.

He explained.

Edward Bernays
To influence the public, the engineer of consent works with and through group leaders and opinion molders on every level.

Primarily, however, the engineer of consent must create news.

The developing of events and circumstances that are not routine is one of the basic functions of the engineer of consent.

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 A
One of Brunet's most famous engineered news events came on behalf of the American Tobacco Company for their lucky strike cigarettes. It was 1929 and it was still taboo for women to smoke in public. But the american tobacco company saw a goldmine in potential women smokers.

After consulting with a psychologist, Bernays determined that they had to target the larger social taboo of women smoking. If that taboo could be destroyed, the floodgates would open for his client.

Bernays recruited a group of ten debutantes and armed them with lucky strike cigarettes. They were instructed to casually join the Easter Day parade in New York City on Fifth Avenue. Once they joined the parade, they lit their cigarettes and photographers snapped away, including one photographer strategically placed by Bernays team.

When asked by reporters why they were openly smoking on the street, the headline on the front page of the New York Times the very next day read, quote a group of girls puff at cigarettes as a gesture of freedom.

Over the next several days, women all over America copied the stunt, lighting up in broad daylight on city streets. Within a month, Broadway theaters allowed women into smoking rooms that had been only for men.

By linking smoking to challenging male power and women asserting their independence. Along with a well choreographed stunt, Bernays engineered plenty of consent for lucky strike cigarettes. And no one knew that Bernays and the american tobacco company were behind the whole thing.

Edward Bernays was rather genius at knowing how to manipulate large groups of people.

But how exactly did he know how to push peoples buttons like that?

Speaker E
Wouldn't it be nice if you lived in a country where you didn't have to constantly worry that your government was lying to you? A country where you could take it for granted that they weren't making decisions based on what they think is in your best interest and not what you think is? History shows us, unfortunately, that the more bloated a government gets, the more this happens. I make it a point to make critical decisions for myself and my family and you should too. You should get a Jace case. It is a personalized emergency kit that contains essential antibiotics and medications that treat the most common and deadly bacterial infections. It provides five life saving antibiotics for emergency use and all you have to do is fill out a simple form online and you'll have it in case you need it. There are also add on options like epipens and ivermectin Jace medical. They encourage you to take your family's.

Speaker A
Health into your own hands.

Speaker E
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Speaker A
Discount on your order.

Speaker E
That's promo code beckase.com dot.

Speaker A
When Edward Bernays was growing up in America, he only occasionally saw his uncle Sigmund Freud as his family visited their native Austria. But as an adult, Bernays corresponded regularly with Freud. In 1919, after sending Freud a box of Havana cigars. Freud thanked Bernays by gifting him a copy of the introductory lectures on psychoanalysis.

While Bernays was fascinated by the potential applications of his uncle's psychoanalytical principles to public relations and advertising, Bernays realized this is what would give him a competitive edge in the marketplace of public manipulation.

Here again, biographer Larry Tighe Bernays was.

Speaker C
Freud's nephew, but in fact a better way of characterizing it was that Sigmund Freud was Eddie Bernays professional uncle. Which meant that five minutes after you met Bernays he managed to drop into the conversation something about Uncle Sigmund.

Sigmund Freud was a defining influence for Eddie Bernays in the sense that when Bernays took on a client he thought about who the client was trying to reach and how he could understand the psychology of behavior of the american public. To make it easier to have the public respond to what his client's interests.

Speaker A
Were to manipulate the public toward a particular goal Bernays would bypass the rational part of the mind and target instead people's unconscious desires and drives which was the basis of his uncle Sigmund's work. So for example, Bernays counseled car companies to sell cars as symbols of male sexuality and it resulted in decades of car commercials like this one from the sixties.

Speaker B
Cougar, it's your man. Enough Cougar, it's the meanest and most masculine road animal yet.

Edward Bernays
Cougar if you're mad.

Speaker B
Enough, Cougar.

Speaker A
In a 1947 Newsweek article it described Bernays covert persuasion. Like this quote one of Bernays favorite symbols is the iceberg. What you see is biggest but what you don't see is a lot bigger. Like the iceberg, much of Bernays own work is invisible.

Bernays success at manipulating the public's subconscious always had an authoritarian edge to it.

Listen to what he wrote in his 1928 book propaganda.

Edward Bernays
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 which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed and our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of.

It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.

Speaker A
This is Brene's second daughter Ann. In a 2002 BBC documentary called the century of the self.

Jen Easterly
He felt the people were really pretty stupid and that's the paradox.

If you don't leave it up to the people themselves but force them to choose what you want them to choose, however subtly, then it's not democracy anymore, it's something else. It's being told what to do. It's being, it's that old authoritarian thing.

Speaker A
Bernays eventually admitted that his whole manipulation strategy could be abused.

Edward Bernays
The techniques can be subverted. Demagogues can utilize the techniques for anti democratic purposes with as much success as can those who employ them for socially desirable ends.

Speaker A
One prominent nazi leader took Bernays writings to heart despite the fact that Bernays was jewish.

That was the voice of Joseph Goebbels, the nazi minister of propaganda. In that clip he said it may be a good thing to hold power based on guns but it is far better if you win the heart of the nation and keep its affection.

Goebbels did just that. He was responsible for all nazi propaganda, including their anti jewish messaging campaign as well as the massive nazi rallies and parades that struck Germany with awe and the rest of the world with terror.

Goebbels said this effort was, quote, to forge the mind of a nation into a unity of thinking, feeling and desire, end quote.

Goebbels showed the horrific possibilities of Bernays ideas in the hands of domineering governments.

In 1933, Bernays first learned from an american journalist who had interviewed Goebbels in Germany that Goebbels was using principles from Bernays books in the nazi propaganda strategy.

In his 1965 autobiography, Bernays recounted, they.

Edward Bernays
Were using my books as the basis for a destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me, but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones.

Speaker A
Unfortunately, Bernays would go on to apply his manipulation techniques to more than just helping companies sell their products.

In the early 19 hundreds, many central american nations became known as banana republics because of the political influence wielded in those nations by an american company called United Fruit.

By the 1950s United Fruit Company was the largest employer and landowner in Guatemala.

But Jacopo Arbenz, who was Guatemala's new democratically elected president, had other ideas.

He began redistribution of unused tracts of United Fruit company land to thousands of poor guatemalan families. The guatemalan government paid United Fruit Company in government bonds for the 400,000 acres that were confiscated.

United Fruit needed an emergency solution so they called on the master of spin, Edward Bernays.

In one of his trademark moves, Bernays created a phony news agency called the Middle American Information Bureau.

Through this bureau he flooded the american media with news releases about the supposedly growing communist threat in Guatemala.

His full on offensive worked using resources and research provided by United Fruit Company. Bernays got the nations most influential publications to run stories about Guatemala's communist threat and resulted in newsreel reports.

Speaker B
Like in Guatemala, the Jacob R Benz regime became increasingly communistic after its inauguration in 1951. Communists in the Congress and high governmental positions controlled major committees, labor and farm groups, propaganda facilities.

They agitated and led in demonstrations against neighboring countries and the United States.

Speaker A
In 1952 Bernays even took a group of journalists on a two week tour of Guatemala. The entire trip was carefully orchestrated and of course the whole thing paid for by the United Fruit Company.

Years later Bernays was accused of having set up anti us demonstrations that reporters witnessed but he always denied any involvement.

Ultimately brunes relentless media campaign convinced the Eisenhower administration that a growing communist influence in Guatemala posed an immediate threat to the United States.

It was an early piece of the domino theory of us foreign policy. The idea that the US needed to counter any communist takeover of a country. Because if that takeover succeeded then communism would inevitably spread to surrounding nations and they would all fall like dominoes.

In 1954, after years long influence campaign by Bernays an exiled army officer named Carlos Armas along with 200 men recruited and trained by the CIA launched a successful coup.

Within a few weeks Armas was made president.

From the moment the coup began Bernays was the primary source of information about the operation for the largest us and international news agencies including the Associated Press.

But Bernays spun the coup as heroic freedom fighters liberating Guatemala from soviet backed communism.

Communism was percolating in Guatemala at the time but most historians now agree that Bernays spearheaded an exaggerated threat and that President R Benz and his supporters were radical but not actually pro communist.

Regardless, a few months after the successful coup us vice president Richard Nixon arrived in Guatemala for a filmed press event with the new president Armas. Nixon spoke to the cameras in front of piles of communist literature supposedly found in the offices of the previous regime.

Speaker B
This is the first time in the history of the world that the communist government has been overthrown by the people. And for that we congratulate you and the people of Guatemala for the support they have given.

And we are sure that under your leadership, supported by the people whom I have met by the hundreds on my visit to Guatemala, that Guatemala is going to enter a new era in which there will be prosperity for the people together with liberty for the people.

Speaker A
Bernays had become too good at his job.

It was one thing to manipulate people to appeal to their unconscious desire to sell them soap or cars but it was another thing entirely to use the same techniques to topple government.

70 years after the CIA backed coup in Guatemala, the us government is applying technology to public manipulation efforts in ever more sophisticated ways. Regime changes are rarely so obvious as CIA operations.

Now the work is done by a complex blend of NGo's.

The Arab Spring uprisings during the Obama administration, for example, featured a number of groups and individuals who received training from US NGo's, including Freedom House, funded by the State Department, and groups affiliated with the National Endowment for Democracy, which is also federally funded.

In 2009, a young man named Jared Cohen was the assistant secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He was a key influencer in the digital revolution, driving much of the Arab Spring protests. The New York Times profile at the time called him the public face of 21st century statecraft.

In 2010, Google started a new unit called Google Ideas.

It was started, as one report described it, to try out ideas that address the challenges of counterterrorism, counter radicalism and non proliferation, end quote.

Google hired Jared Cohen as the director of the new unit. Cohen later explained that he made the move to Google ideas because there are, quote, things the private sector can do that the us government cannot. End quote.

Sounds very much like a young Edward Bernays.

In 2016, Google Ideas changed its name to Jigsaw and debuted a new tool known as the redirect method. Jigsaw's partner in developing the redirect method was a british company called Moonshot.

According to both companies, this tool, quote, places ads in search results and social media feeds of users who are searching for pre identified terms that we have associated with a particular online harm, end quote.

Those ads in the search results then redirect the user to content that provides, quote, constructive alternative messages, end quote.

Moonshot has also partnered on projects with the US State Department.

Initially, Jigsaw and Moonshot's redirect method was hyped as a way to target potential ISIS recruits. But shortly after it launched in 2016, the co founder of Moonshot said phase two of the redirect tool would target right wing extremists in the US.

These are companies that have partnerships with the us and british government agencies working on advanced technology to steer public opinion.

I would say imagine what Edward Bernays could accomplish with this kind of technology, but you don't have to imagine it.

These public private partnerships are full of Edward Bernays.

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Speaker A
All right, now, doctor, what? Tell me again what the doctor is.

Speaker B
What are we dealing with?

Speaker A
You're the father of public relations.

Edward Bernays
What are we dealing with really is the concept that people will believe me more if you call me doctor.

Speaker A
Oh, I see.

That was Edward Bernays on David Letterman's late night show in 1985.

He was then 93 years old.

He was joking there about perceived expertise, but that was the magic trick of his entire career.

He truly believed in the importance of so called experts in steering the public in a particular direction. And it is a belief that is still pervasive in progressivism today.

The author Fulton Oersler once met Bernays at a dinner party and described him as a wily fellow forever enchanted with his own skills, trying to apply the doctrines of his uncle Sigmund Freud to control the thinking of masses of people on behalf of big business, while advocating a kind of mild socialism of his own. End quote.

Like most other disciples of progressivism through the years, Bernays believed himself to be one of the elites who knows what's best for society at large.

He also had the very human drive to make sure everyone knew he was part of the elite by constantly brandishing his accomplishments, Bernays older daughter Doris told an interviewer that her father embellished his achievements because he grew up in the shadow of his domineering father and his famous uncle Sigmund Freud. She said, quote, my father couldn't let it be. He had to keep on constructing it and defining it and embellishing it, end quote.

He apparently even embellished his own name, adding the middle initial l, which supposedly stood for Lewis, but not even his daughters are sure if that was his actual middle name since it wasn't listed in his birth record.

Ultimately, Bernays even used his go to strategy of getting an expert to endorse a certain point of view in order to enhance his own legend.

Eric F. Goldman, a historian at Princeton University, wrote a book about the history of public relations and praised Bernays as the most crucial innovator in the PR field.

According to biographer Larry Tighe, it turns out Bernays came up with the idea for the book, got Goldman to write it, helped him find a publisher and even helped him edit the book and eventually purchased from Goldman all rights to the book.

In 1990, Life magazine named Bernays on the list of the hundred most important Americans of the 20th century. His book crystallizing public opinion is still used today in college public relations courses. Bernays unique influence on american life probably would have gotten him that kind of recognition which he craved without all of the self aggrandizing.

But it certainly didn't hurt.

Biographer Larry Tighe summed up Bernays influence.

Speaker C
Like there's never been a spin master in the history of America and probably in the world who has the kind of ongoing impact that Edward Bernays has today on everything from the way we buy to the way we vote to the way we think.

Speaker A
I began this season of the Beck story podcast with an episode about a guy named Frederick W. Taylor and his invention of what he termed scientific management.

As many critics have shown since Taylor's time, his work wasn't actually scientific at all. He applied his method to factories of his day, conducting his efficiency studies and getting paid handsomely to show owners how they could save a buck or two by following his efficiency advice.

Progressives of the era fell head over heels in love with scientific management because it had so many applications for government.

Edward Bernays pioneered ways to take scientific management and apply it to managing society.

He was always striving to make his version of public relations at least appear to be more science than showmanship.

In true progressive fashion, that meant backing it up with the authority of government.

Even as late as 1991, when Bernays was about to turn 100 years old, he was still campaigning to get legislation passed in several states, including Massachusetts where he lived, that would require government licensing of public relations professionals.

His effort never paid off, but progressives are still in love with that approach.

In June 2024, the editors of Scientific American published an editorial titled homeschooling needs more uniform oversight, in which they cry out for the urgent regulation of homeschooling families.

The editors said that the Biden administration must develop basic standards for safety and quality of education in homeschooling across the country.

One of Scientific American's suggestions for this regulation is that parents quote could be required to pass an initial background check as every state requires for all k twelve teachers.

This is where the cult of expertise leads society to the point where they try to make it sound reasonable to require you to pass a background check to teach your own child.

The cult of expertise usually wraps its arguments in language about safety and standards, but in reality its often driven by fear that people might think for themselves and resist the experts agenda.

In 2016, Oxfords Dictionary word of the year was post truth.

Oxford then went on to define post truth as quote relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

A century of Bernays influence had redefined truth.

Listen to that Oxford dictionary definition again.

We're post truth now where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

That's Bernays whole approach, appealing to our irrational side to get to the truth he was selling and sometimes even inventing the so called truth in the process.

Throughout his career, Bernays repeatedly proved that very strategic messaging using perceived experts and very well choreographed so called news events can actually change the public's belief and habits.

He accomplished all of that in an analog world.

Bernays would have a field day in today's digital world.

In the 1950s and sixties, the CIA performed notorious mind control experiments through a project called MkUltra.

Ostensibly the program was a reaction to american paranoia about communist brainwashing and fears over the psychological warfare being developed by the Soviet Union. MkUltra performed experiments on Americans using electroshock therapy, hypnosis, radiation and especially LSD.

Sometimes the subjects were volunteers, but often they were not. And they included drug addicted prisoners, prostitutes and terminally ill cancer patients.

Today there is a head spitting convergence of intelligence and other government agencies with big tech companies.

The new paranoia is that we're falling behind China in a race for AI dominance.

In October 2023, President Biden signed an executive order demanding more research and deployment of AI across all federal agencies.

Edward Bernays
I'm about to sign an executive order. An executive order that is the most significant action any government anywhere in the world has ever taken on AI. Safety, security and trust.

Speaker A
In May 2024, the US Defense Department, the think tank called Mitre, announced a deal with the California tech company Nvidia to build an AI supercomputer.

They call it an AI sandbox that will allow federal agencies from the Pentagon to the IR's to test cutting edge applications to speed up the deployment of AI all across the federal government.

Beside the ample concern over surveillance and privacy that these public private partnerships raise, what about the threat of Bernays style manipulation?

Big tech companies collect a staggering amount of data on us that creates the ability to create psychological profiles and predict our motives for doing things. A Forbes magazine reporter downloaded the data that Google alone had collected about her and it amounted to 2gb, roughly the equivalent of 1.5 million word documents.

No government should have access to such tools of manipulation.

The left is increasingly concerned about Americans thinking the correct way.

Listen to this from Jen Easterly in 2021. She is the director of cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security.

Jen Easterly
We're in the business of critical infrastructure and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure. And so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation I think is incredibly important. And we're going to work with our partners in the private sector and throughout the rest of the government and at the department to continue to ensure that the american people have the facts that they need to help protect our critical infrastructure.

Speaker A
Any American who values free thought and free speech should squirm at the head of a government agency talking about our cognitive infrastructure.

What happens, for instance, if the government decides? Your insistence that there are only two genders comprises a defect in your cognitive infrastructure.

Bernays believed that the average person is basically stupid and needs to be told what to think.

He believed that it was the job of the expertise elites like himself to guide the minds of the stupid masses.

This Bernays mindset shows no sign of slowing down.

In 2024, a Rasmussen survey divided respondents between elites and the general public. They defined elites as Americans who have had at least one postgraduate degree and earn over $150,000 a year. They also polled a separate group of what they called super elites who are graduates of Ivy League and other elite colleges.

They found that 47% of elites and 55% of super elites believe the government allows Americans too much individual freedom.

70% of elites say they trust the government to do the right thing most of the time. That is more than twice the national average.

Bernays, just like current left wing elites in government, justified control efforts as a means for defending democracy.

If the elites don't keep a proper lid on things, you see the public will give in to their base desires and will have fascism.

Bernays didn't believe in Goddesse and he loathed religion, even though he was ethnically jewish. He turned his back on Judaism.

In 1984, historian Marvin Olaski interviewed Bernays who told him, we have no being in the air to watch over us.

Therefore, Alaski writes, Bernays told him that we need human gods to preserve us from chaos.

The progressive cult of expertise is about to go into overdrive with the super spread of artificial intelligence. There are labs full of engineers devising AI applications for everything under the sun to ensure you don't have to think for yourself.

In May 2024, the founder of the dating app Bumble told an audience at a tech conference that soon you'll be able to have your personal AI dating concierge concierge go out and date other concierges for you, then provide you with the best match.

Human gods, as Bernays put it, are now in the air in the form of AI. And there is a perverse rush to embrace these gods without really knowing what theyll do to us.

Two academic studies published June 2024 found that certain AI systems are learning to lie and deceive.

In fact, one of the studies discovered that OpenAI's GPT four demonstrated deceptive behavior in simple test scenarios 99.16% of the time.

The researchers found that sophisticated large language models can be encouraged to elicit machiavelliism.

In other words, Bernays style manipulation.

Bernays called it nearly a century ago in his book Propaganda.

Edward Bernays
We are governed. Our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of.

It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

Speaker A
Considering the theme of this first season of the Beck story, it may surprise you to hear me say this, but not all experts are bad.

This season is not a universal indictment of expertise. True expertise can be trustworthy and help a free society thrive in all sorts of ways. I mean, you certainly want your surgeon to be an expert in the field, right?

The key is expertise paired with wisdom.

Humility.

Wisdom and expertise are not the same thing.

Genuinely wise experts have the proper humility to understand that they may not know everything and that their expertise may have limits, that their position on something could change in light of new information.

Expertise built with wisdom is rare, but a necessary pairing.

After well over a century of progressive dominance, american government and institutions, we clearly need less expertise and more wisdom.

In a nation that is turning its back on objective truth, we are more vulnerable than ever to the experts pulling the wires that control the public mind. As Bernays put it, to counteract the progressive cult of expertise, we must demonstrate that government of the people by the people and for the people is not only possible, but preferable.

With diligence and determination.

We must become the wise kind of experts.

Experts in recognizing and exposing lies, spin propaganda.

Experts in elevating truth.

We'll see you next season.

We constantly rely on experts to make decisions for us.

Bill Clinton
Because even eyewitnesses and experts can get it wrong.

Speaker B
The experts do get things wrong.

Bill Clinton
You have to seek out sources from.

Speaker A
Other points of view and then critically.

Bill Clinton
Examine their motivations and credibility as well.