Hey internet friends.
We are living in the age of technology, an age in which vast amounts of information are
at our fingertips, and we can connect with each other in just a few keystrokes.
The world wide web is stuffed like a thanksgiving turkey, full of an endless buffet of distractions,
breaking news headlines, advertisements masquerading as entertainment, and a seemingly infinite
trove of ever-evolving information, from which the elusive truths of this world are the greatest
treasure—so that is why today we’re going to discuss how the internet became a battlefield
in the war on our minds.
The father of psychoanalysis was born in the Austrian Empire in 1856 to Eastern European
Jewish parents.
It was in Vienna that Sigmund Freud researched and experimented on the human mind, concluding
that ‘man was the most ferocious animal in existence’, and tucked inside the minds
of all these animals were “primitive sexual and aggressive forces”—forces that had
the power to unleash widespread chaos and even the potential to topple governments.
While Freud warned that governments had set loose these dangerous forces with World War
I, Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays, had been employed to keep the war drums beating.
President Woodrow Wilson needed Americans to get on board with the war machine, and
he turned to propagandists to do just that—to convince Americans to join the fight under
the guise of spreading democracy across all of Europe so that a hopeful future might unfold,
one where individuals across the world could experience good ol’ American freedom.
But Bernays wasn’t too keen on the propagandist title.
He claimed, ironically, that the Germans had tainted the term, and thus, he reinvented
it—emerging as the father of public relations.
You see, Bernays had witnessed firsthand how powerful propaganda was at promoting war,
so for his next act, Bernays decided to use propaganda—whoops I mean—public relations
to promote peace.
How, might you ask, did Bernays execute such a noble deed?
Well, his uncle, who by the way, hated humans, especially Americans, had some interesting
ideas on human nature, and Bernays decided it was time to weaponize those ideas—for
peace of course.
For peace!
American corporations emerged even more powerful after the first world war, and in order to
maintain their cashflow, and in other words, their influence, business owners realized
they needed to keep their workers in their factories to increase their production.
And of course, there is no supply without demand—that’s why Bernay’s big business
clients hired him to figure out exactly what motivated the human mind so corporations could
better appeal to the masses.
The year was 1928 when the President of the American Tobacco Company looked to Bernays
to increase sales, providing Bernays with an opportunity to conduct an experiment of
sorts.
This was a time when women smoking in public was stigmatized, but both Bernays and his
client knew an untapped market when they saw one.
Bernays employed psychoanalysis, learning that cigarettes symbolized the penis, therefore
male sexual power, and he figured that if he could connect smoking cigarettes to the
idea of challenging male sexual power, he could sell a pack of smokes to both genders.
Everyone was a winner, but their lungs were not.
So, at the Easter Day parade, Bernays set up a huge publicity stunt: he’d already
tipped off the press and supplied them with their new propaganda piece—I mean public
relations phrase, “Torches of Freedom”, which the press would then capture when a
group of paid-off debutantes posing as suffragettes lit up their cigarettes in the middle of the
parade, making the single act of igniting a torch of freedom a gesture of female empowerment—wrapped
up in one stinky PR package meant to render emotion from all who might look upon it, skyrocketing
tobacco sales and forever linking human desire and feelings with products—because it’s
not like the actual act of becoming a human chimney made women any freer, but it sure
made them feel like it.
And with this realization, Bernays felt confident that his tactics could emotionally manipulate
the masses to purchase product on the basis of want, not need, and all these dangerous
primitive forces his uncle was droning on about were made more docile through Bernays’
manipulation of habits and opinions.
Bernays had successfully remixed the Roman’s bread and circuses.
The average Joe was so occupied, in fact, that most didn’t even realize a new mentality,
shaped by corporate appeal, was binding and guiding America, creating a clear path for
a new elite to control the masses through psychological techniques—forming a grand
illusion of this thing we now call “democracy”.
Though traditional warfare had ended with WWII, the psychological warfare of an unseen
enemy was just getting started.
The masses were led to believe the world’s boogeyman had been defeated, and that a global
government organization, the United Nations, had been established to ensure peace and security
in the aftermath of all the horror.
Post-war United States was as strong as ever, with its workforce fueled by the American
dream, at the center of which was family, but out of the rubble and ruin of battle rose
a subversive force, one of many names and faces: communism, cultural marxism, soviet
involvement, big brother…regardless of the title, the goal of this variety of psychological
warfare was one of a new world order, brought about by a slow-roll brainwashing of sorts,
known as ideological subversion, made up of four stages:
Stage one: demoralization—which begins in the classroom.
Instead of teaching children to act morally, in favor of themselves, their families, their
communities, and their country, under the process of ideological subversion, demoralization
takes place over a generation, where, in compulsory public schooling, a manipulated account of
history is branded into the brains of every pupil and unrighteous behavior is encouraged
at school, through television programming and other vehicles of propaganda.
These lessons are reinforced at the university level, resulting in brainwashed cattle at
every level of power: government, business, media, and education.
If stage one is successful, the individual’s perception of reality is so warped that any
attempts to get them to recognize authentic information would be to no avail.
After that, all that’s needed is a good two to five years in order to implement stage
two, the destabilization of a nation.
This is the time that the subverting party has the opportunity to crash the economy,
ruin foreign relations, and disarm the defense systems just in time for phase three, the
crisis phase, intended to usher in a change of power, brownie points if it’s a violent
and dramatic change of power.
The final stage is normalization, which is the “welcome to your life as human cattle,
please line up to get branded” phase—which might be a slight exaggeration, although if
you think about it, not really.It’s kind of curious that while all of this ideological
subversion was allegedly being implemented during the Cold War at the hands of the Bolshevik
Communist Lenin Marxist Soviet Red Scare “Hide Under Your Desk, Y’all.
We’re about to get nuked” Boogeyman, United States government agencies formed post WWII
were utilizing the same psychological tactics not just on foreign nations, but on regular
ol’ unsuspecting Americans.
In the early 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency used major media companies for propaganda
purposes in order to sway public opinion during the Cold War—a move right out of Bernay’s
playbook.
This program was known as Operation Mockingbird, and in addition to controlling executives,
reporters, and other staff within major media companies, the CIA also put forth their own
agents as journalists of the so called “free press”; journalists who worked around the
clock, especially after the assassination of President Kennedy, doing their patriotic
duty to suppress truth from the American people, forcing witnesses to change their story, and
silencing those who questioned the official narrative.
Meanwhile, during that same time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation established their
own counter intelligence program with the intention of “surveilling, infiltrating,
discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations” or basically any groups or
individuals they deemed problematic.
Cointelpro’s greatest hits (no pun intended) include infiltrating civil and women’s rights
movements and even groups who protested the Vietnam War.
They went above and beyond, infiltrating groups and dismantling them by creating inner conflicts
amongst members, aggressive surveillance, character attacks published by the mockingbird
media, and if all that didn’t work—the FBI would attempt to break up marriages and
push an individual to suicide.
Both the FBI’s cointelpro and the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird were reportedly terminated
in the 1970s, but the manipulation of the masses certainly didn’t end with these programs.
PART IIIWhile newspaper, radio, and television dominated the first age of information, the
computer age ushered in the second installment.
In 1960, the United States Department of Defense began awarding contracts for what would now
be considered the primitive internet, and in 1989, the world wide web as we know it,
the same tool that billions of people utilize to this day, was developed by the European
Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN.
In 1984, only 8.4 % percent of American households had a computer, rising to 36% in 1997, and
in 2015, 87%.
In 2018, 95% of Americans reported owning a cellphone and of that 95% pecent, 77% reported
owning smart phone, meaning that the vast majority of Americans have a plethora of information
at their fingertips at any given moment.
In a few clicks, they can educate themselves on any topic imaginable, connect to individuals
thousands of miles away, and learn about events before the news even has a chance to report
on them.
So much information, and so little regulation.
That’s what Harvard Law Professor and President Obama’s Administrator of the White House
Office of Information was probably thinking nearly a decade ago when he started publishing
his tactics to control the flow of information online.
His target?
Conspiracy theories.
In an academic paper he wrote in 2008, Cass Sunstein managed to marry elements of Edward
Bernays manipulation of the masses with a touch of operation mockingbird and a dash
of cointelpro tactics in order to counter information online that he suggested was a
threat to the United States government.
Sunstein defined conspiracy theories as, “an effort to explain some event or practice by
references to the machinations of powerful people who attempt to conceal their role (at
least until their aims are accomplished)”.
While Sunstein admitted that some conspiracy theories are true, making them just…conspiracies,
like Project MK Ultra, Watergate, Operation Northwoods, and the Bush administration illegally
spying on US citizens after 9/11, he still advocated his policy for silencing conspiracy
theorists, saying that “Governments should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups
that produce conspiracy theories.”
And rather ironically, Sunstein recommended that government officials should utilize conspiratorial
means to accomplish this, taking on false identities or even anonymity in online social
networks, chatrooms, and in-person to undermine groups and individuals who investigate, discuss,
and propagate theories.
Though, it’s curious—Sunstein didn’t take aim at any other fallible variety of
theory that resulted in harm to someone, somewhere.
Scientific theories got a free pass.
Sunstein’s message can be boiled down to the following: if you outspokenly call for
transparency in government and circulate research about events that might or might not have
transpired or might not have happened the way the mockingbird media said they did, Sunstein
says the government doesn’t trust you and you need to be dealt with.
Let’s all take a moment of silence for Cass Sunstein, press F to pay respects as he is
a victim of ideological subversion, or at least we hope so, because his treasonous and
despicable behavior is otherwise inexcusable.
While I’d like to tell you that Sunstein’s efforts and the efforts of those before him
to control the flow of information online have been unsuccessful, it only takes a quick
glance at the present to recognize their fruit.
Dissenting voices are silenced every day online for expressing even the most lukewarm controversial
opinion whilst appointed arbiters of truth are pushed into the public eye under the guise
of being independent or alternative media.
Today, only six companies control 90% of American media outlets, and one company has the monopoly
on the main gateway to the treasure trove of information the world wide web has to offer.
That company is Google, owned by Alphabet Inc.
The lines between corporations and governments aren’t just blurred anymore—they barely
exist at all.
And just when people start to take notice that something isn’t quite right, another
distraction gets rolled out, probably some breaking news headline on a polarizing issue
into which well-meaning people throw their energy—social media then becomes weaponized,
dividing people into virtual armies that endlessly attack each other.
White versus black.
Men versus women.
Muslims versus Christians.
Gay versus straight.
Antifa versus the alt-right.
The left hand path versus the right hand path—regardless of which path you take, they all lead to the
same destination.
Gah, It’s all so draining.
So why don’t you sit back, relax and watch a little Netflix—a company founded by none
other than the grand nephew of Edward Bernays?
And that is how the internet became a battlefield in the war on our minds.Thank you so much
for watching, internet friends.
You know I always look forward to your comments.
Thank you for subscribing and supporting my channel on Patreon.
Bye!