Disturbing History - Nazi Propaganda & The American Mirror

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

The word propaganda began as something holy. In sixteen twenty-two a committee of cardinals in Rome coined it to mean the spreading of the faith, and in this episode I follow that single word as it curdles across the bloodiest century human beings have ever managed to produce.This is the story of how mass persuasion got built, who built it, and the deeply uncomfortable truth that the most murderous propaganda machine in history did not invent its methods from nothing. It borrowed them, and some of what it borrowed, it borrowed from us.We start with Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of public relations, the man who sold cigarettes to American women as torches of freedom and who learned to his horror that Joseph Goebbels kept his books on a shelf in Berlin. From there we trace the dress rehearsal of yellow journalism and the sinking of the Maine, the Creel Committee of the First World War, and the corpse-factory lie that taught a whole generation to disbelieve the real death camps when the reports finally came.Then we walk straight into the Nazi machine itself, told without flinching and without sensationalism, through Goebbels and the big lie, the People's Receiver that put the Führer's voice in every German kitchen, Leni Riefenstahl's beautiful and monstrous films, the Cathedral of Light, the Reichstag fire, the cleaned-up Berlin Olympics, and the quiet horror of the language of euphemism, the soft clean words laid over genocide so the clerks could do the work without ever naming it.And then I turn the camera around, onto the country that crossed an ocean to destroy that machine and built machines of its own. The racist campaign against the Japanese that walked off the screen and into the internment camps. The permanent Cold War apparatus, the secret funding of broadcasters and magazines, Bernays and the Guatemala coup, the Church Committee, and COINTELPRO, including the letter the Federal Bureau of Investigation wrote trying to drive Doctor King to suicide.The Gulf of Tonkin, the Pentagon Papers, the incubator testimony of nineteen ninety, the weapons of mass destruction that were never there, the Mission Accomplished banner, the generals on your television secretly reading the Pentagon's lines, and the wall that quietly came down in twenty twelve.I want to be clear about something, because the cheap version of this story gets it wrong. America is not Nazi Germany, the difference in scale is the size of the abyss, and the men who died to stop the real thing deserve better than that lazy equation.The machine was never a German machine. It was a human machine, the levers work on all of us, and the most disturbing history in this whole account is not the history of the men who lied. It is the history of how gratefully the rest of us believed them, and how that same machine now lives in your pocket and sleeps on your nightstand.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. I want to start with a word, just one word. Propaganda. It sounds ugly now. It sounds like a slur. Like an accusation you throw at the other side. We use it the way we used to use the word heretic. The enemy has propaganda. We have information.

They lie. We inform. That's the comfortable story. And it's a lie all by itself. The word didn't start out dirty. It started out holy. In the year 1622, Pope Gregory the 15th founded a committee of cardinals in Rome and gave it a Latin name, the Congregato de Propaganda Fide. The congregation for the propagation of the faith. The job was simple. Spread the gospel. Send missionaries out into the world and plant the seed of belief in foreign soil.

Propaganda just meant the things that needed to be propagated, the way a gardener propagates a vine. There was nothing sinister in it. It was a word about spreading, about growing, about reaching the people who hadn't yet heard the good news. So how did a word for spreading the faith become a word for spreading the rot? That's the question. That's the whole question. And the answer runs straight through the bloodiest century human beings have ever managed to produce.

It runs through searchlights, stabbing into a German night sky. It runs through a little brown radio sitting on a kitchen shelf, in Hamburg. It runs through a buck-toothed cartoon of a Japanese soldier and a poster of a woman flexing her arm and a 15-year-old girl crying in front of Congress about babies torn out of incubators. The most efficient, most murderous propaganda operation in the history of the species. The one we point to when we want to define the word. The Nazi machine that talked a civilized country into industrialized genocide didn't invent its methods out of thin air. It borrowed them.

And some of what it borrowed, it borrowed from us. I'm a skeptic by trade and by temperament. And I know from my personal experiences, the official version of any story is a draft, not a verdict. People lie, institutions lie. And the bigger the institution, the bigger the lie it can afford to tell.

Because it owns the microphone and it owns the archive and it owns the men who decide what gets written down. So when I tell you that the, United States, the country that crossed an ocean and bled out half a million men to put a bullet in the Nazi project, has run propaganda campaigns against its enemies and against its own people for more than a century. I'm not doing it to flatten the difference between a democracy and a death cult. The difference is real, and it's enormous, and I will not let anyone pretend otherwise. The Nazis use these tools to murder six million human beings. Nothing in the

American record sits on that scale. But the tools are the same tools. That's the disturbing history. Not that we're them. We aren't. It's that the levers are the same, that they work on the German mind and the American mind and your mind, and in mind, and that the men who run governments have always known it. Let me show you how the machine got built, and let me show you the mirror. There was a man named Edward Bernays, and almost nobody alive has heard. heard his name. And that is exactly the way he wanted it. Bernays was born in Vienna in 1891 and grew up in New York. He had a famous uncle on his mother's side, a doctor named Sigmund Freud, and Bernays took his uncle's ideas about the irrational, hidden engines of the human mind and did something Freud never

dreamed of. He weaponized them for money. Bernays figured out that you didn't have to argue with people. You didn't have to convince their reason. You could go around the reason in time. You could go around the reason entirely and speak straight to the want underneath, the fear underneath, the vanity and the shame and the hunger for belonging that sit below the part of a person that thinks it's in charge. He's the reason American women started smoking in public. In 1929, the tobacco companies wanted to break the taboo that kept respectable women from lighting up on the street, so they hired Bernays. He didn't run an ad.

He hired a group of fashionable young women to march in the New York City Easter Parade, And at a signal, each of them pulled out a cigarette and lit it. And Bernays had already tipped off the press to expect a demonstration. And he fed them the line. Torches of freedom. The cigarettes became a symbol of women's liberation, of throwing off the old corset of male control. It wasn't liberation.

It was lung cancer with a marketing budget. But it worked because Bernays understood that you don't sell the product. You sell what the product means. He wrote a book in 1920. and he gave it the most honest title anyone in his line of work has ever dared use. He called it propaganda. The very first lines lay it out cold. He wrote that the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses

is an invisible government that is the true ruling power of the country. He wrote that those who manipulate this unseen mechanism constitute the real power and that we are governed, our minds molded, our tastes form, Our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. He didn't think this was a problem. He thought it was civilization. He thought the herd needed to be guided by its betters, and he had appointed himself one of the betters.

Years later, after the war, Bernays was at a dinner, and a journalist who'd been a foreign correspondent in Germany told him something. He told him that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, kept his books in his personal library, and used his ideas to build the campaign against the, the German Jews. He wrote about this himself. He was a Jew, after all. His methods, his theories of the irrational crowd, the same techniques he used to sell cigarettes and soap, had been studied and absorbed by the men who organized the murder of his own people. He said it shocked him. I believe

it did. But he didn't stop. He kept right on working until he was over a hundred years old, and the industry he founded, public relations. That gentle phrase he invented, he invented, that gentle phrase he invented precisely because the word propaganda had gone toxic. That industry now spends tens of billions of dollars a year doing exactly what he described, molding your mind by men you've never heard of. So keep Bernays in the back of your head. The first great laboratory of modern mass persuasion wasn't Berlin. It was Washington in the spring of 1917, and Bernays was in the room. Although if I want to be precise, the country had already run a dress rehearsal nearly 20 years, years before that, and it didn't even take a government to do it. It took two newspaper barons

and a sunken ship. In the 1890s, two men, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were locked in a circulation war in New York, each trying to sell more papers than the other, and they'd both discovered the same thing every propagandist discovers eventually. Outrage cells. Fear cells. A simple story with a villain and a victim sells, and the truth of it barely matters, next to the heat of it. They called the style yellow journalism, and they aimed it at Spain, which still held Cuba, and they ran lurid, half-invented stories of Spanish cruelty day after day to whip up the American appetite for a war. Then in February of 1898, an American battleship, the Maine, blew up and sank in Havana Harbor, and the cause was almost certainly an accident,

an explosion in the coal bunkers next to the ammunition. The papers didn't wait for the United States. The papers didn't wait for an investigation. They didn't want one. Remember the main? They screamed. On front pages across the country, blaming Spain for a murder, there was no evidence Spain had committed. There's a story, maybe true and maybe polished up later, that Hurst told one of his artists in Cuba, a man who'd cabled home that there was no war to illustrate, to furnish the pictures, and Hurst would furnish the war. Whether he said those exact words or not, that's exactly what he did. The country got its war, Spain lost an empire, and the United States walked out of it holding Cuba and Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and the lesson sat there in plain view for anyone paying attention.

You can move a nation to war with ink. You just have to know which feelings to print. When the United States entered the First World War, the country was badly split. A huge chunk of the population was German by blood, or recent enough by immigration, that the idea of going to Europe to kill Germans had no appeal at all. Woodrow Wilson had just won re-election on a slogan that bragged he'd kept the country out of the war, and then he took it in. He needed the public turned around, and he needed it turned around fast, so within a week of the declaration, he signed an executive order creating something brand new in American life. The Committee on Public Information Everyone called it the Creel Committee, after the man Wilson put in charge, a former newspaper man

named George Creel. The Creel Committee was the first time the United States government built a machine whose only purpose was to manufacture a state of mind in the American people. And it was good at it. It was frighteningly good. Creel recruited an army of volunteers he called the four-minute men, 75,000 of them by the end. The idea was that a man would stand up in a movie theater during the real change, which took about four minutes and deliver a short, hot, scripted speech to the captive audience in the dark. Buy bonds. Watch your neighbors. Report the disloyal.

The committee sent out the talking points from Washington, and the same message, the same emotional charge, went out across thousands of theaters in a single night to millions of people who had no idea they were hearing a coordinated campaign. They thought they were hearing their neighbor. The committee flooded the country with posters and pamphlets and films, and the picture it painted of the enemy was not a piece. picture of a soldier. It was a picture of a monster. The German became the Hun, a slavering ape and a spiked helmet carrying off a half-naked woman, his hands dripping. The atrocity stories ran wild,

German soldiers bayoneting babies in Belgium, German soldiers cutting the hands off children. Some of the worst stories were simply invented. There was a tale spread by British propaganda and echoed in America that the Germans had built a secret factory where they boiled down the corpses of their own dead soldiers to render the fat into glycerin and lubricants. The corpse factory. It was false. Completely false. It worked beautifully in the moment. And then it did something nobody intended. When the next war came and the real report started leaking out of occupied Europe, reports of camps and ovens and mass graves, a lot of sensible, educated people in Britain and America shrugged them off. They'd been fooled once by the corpse factory.

They assumed the death camps were just the same old wartime lie dressed up again. The propaganda of the first war helped people disbelieve the truth of the second. The lie didn't just deceive. It inoculated a generation against the truth, and people died in the gap. Edward Bernays worked for the Creel Committee, so did a lot of the men who would go on to build the American advertising and public relations industry in the 1920s. They learned their craft selling the war, and when the war ended, they took everything they'd learned, the emotional hooks and the manufactured demand, and the third-party endorsement, and the symbol that

stands in for the thing, and they turned it on the American consumer, and they never stopped. The propaganda machine of the First World War didn't get dismantled. It got privatized. That's the soil the Nazi machine grew out of, not German soil, the whole modern world soil. The techniques were already lined. around proven published available to anyone with the stomach to use them the Germans just used them with a discipline and a malice that nobody had ever brought to the work before Joseph Goebbels was a small man with a club foot and a doctorate in literature from Heidelberg and he was one of the most gifted and most evil communicators who

ever lived he failed as a novelist and a playwright and all that thwarted artistic ambition curdled into something else a genius for staging for spectacle for the manipulation of the German feeling. He understood that politics in the modern age would be theater, and he meant to be the director. When Hitler took power at the end of January 1933, one of the very first things the new government did, within weeks,

was create a cabinet ministry that had never existed before in any government on earth. The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. They put the word right in the name. Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. as if those were the same thing, which to Goebbels they were. He became its minister at the age of 35, and from that office, he took control of every channel through which a German might receive an idea.

The newspapers, the radio, the films, the theater, the music, the fine arts, the books. By that autumn, he'd created the Reich Chamber of Culture, and the rule was absolute. If you wanted to write, paint, act, compose, broadcast, or publish anything at all in Germany, you had to be a member. And to be a member, you had to be approved. And to be approved, and to be approved, you had to be useful. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Step outside the line and you didn't get censored. You got erased. You ceased, professionally, to exist. Gerbils had a few core convictions about how to bend a population. The first was repetition. He believed and he said that a lie repeated often enough and loudly enough

and confidently enough becomes accepted as truth, not because anyone proves it, but because the human mind mistakes familiarity for fact. Say a thing once and people question it. Say it 10,000 times, from every direction, in every voice, and it stops being a claim and starts being the air. People defend it as if they'd reasoned their way to it, when really really they just got worn smooth. The second was simplicity. The masses, Goebbels believed, are stupid and lazy and emotional. And you must never give them nuance.

Never give them the complicated truth. Never trust them with a hard fact that has edges. You give them one enemy, one symbol, one feeling, and you give it to them over and over until its reflex. The third and the darkest was the big lie. The phrase actually comes from Hitler, from his book. where he accuses the Jews of using it. He wrote that the broad masses of a nation more readily fall victim to a big lie than a small one,

because they tell little lies themselves in everyday life and would be ashamed to tell a colossal one. And so it never occurs to them that anyone else would have the impudence to distort the truth so completely. The trick of the big lie is that its sheer size is its armor. A small lie invites scrutiny. A big lie is too monstrous to seem like a lie. at all. Hitler said the Jews did this. Then he and Goebbels did it, to the Jews. At a scale the world had never imagined. And what was the biggest lie? It was a lie about why Germany lost the First World War. The German army had not been beaten cleanly in the field, the story went. It had been

stabbed in the back, betrayed at home, sold out by traders and profiteers and cowards behind the lines. And who were the traitors? The Jews. The soldiers. The soldiers. The soldiers. The soldiers. The Socialists, the Republicans who signed the surrender. It was a fantasy, and the German general staff knew perfectly well it was a fantasy, because they were the ones who told the government the war was lost, and the army couldn't fight on. But the stab-in-the-back myth gave a humiliated nation something better than truth. It gave them someone to blame. And the Nazis rode that lie, that one enormous engineered lie, all the way to the

chancellery and then all the way to Auschwitz. Now I want to talk about the machinery. The actual hardware Goebbels used to push these ideas into 30 million German skulls, because the genius was never just in the message. It was in the delivery. Start with the radio. Goebbels called radio the eighth great power, and he understood before almost anyone

that the wireless was the single most intimate and most total medium ever invented, because it came into the home, into the kitchen and the parlor. in the speaker's own living voice, and it reached the man who would never buy a newspaper and never go to a rally. So the regime built a radio set on purpose, a cheap one. Subsidized so ordinary working families could afford it, and they put it into mass production and into millions of homes.

They called it the Volkssimpfinger, the people's receiver. The most common model carried a number, 301, and the number was not random. It marked the date, the 30th of January, the day Hitler became Chancellor. The set was deliberately built with a limited range, tuned to pull in the German National Station strong and clear, and it was a serious crime, punishable with savage penalties, to use it to listen to foreign broadcasts.

They put the furor's voice in the corner of every room in Germany and then made it illegal to turn the dial away. That's not a marketing campaign. That's an occupation of the U.S. inner ear, then the film. Gerbils loved cinema the way a starved man loves food, and he found his great instrument in a brilliant and willing director named Lenny Riefenstahl. In 1934, the party held its enormous annual rally in the city of Nuremberg, and Goebbels and Hitler gave Reefenstahl a budget and a crew and total access, and she made a film called Triumph of the Will. It is,

on the level of pure craft, one of the most technically dazzling films ever show. The moving cameras, the cathedral compositions, the way she shoots Hitler from below so that he looms against the clouds like a descending God. And every frame of that beauty is in service of a monstrous idea. The idea that the German people should dissolve themselves, surrender their individual judgment and their individual conscience, melt down into one great obedient mass with one will and one leader. That was the whole argument of the film, made not with words, but with images of 100,000 men moving as one body. She made another, Olympia, out of the 1936 Berlin Olympics,

selling the same fantasy of Aryan physical perfection to the watching world. And then there were the films with the knife out, the ones that did the dirtiest work. In 1940, Gerbels back to a so-called documentary called The Eternal Jew, which is one of the most vile pieces of film ever made, splicing footage of Jewish people in occupied Poland with shots of swarming rats and disease, telling the audience over and over that the Jew is vermin, the Jew is plague, the Jew is a parasite on the healthy body of the nation.

The same year came a polished feature film called Jud Seuss, a historical melodrama engineered to make ordinary German moviegoers feel a visceral disgust and fear of Jews. And it was a hit, and they screened it for concentration camp guards to harden them for the work ahead. You see what they were doing. They were not just lying about a group of people. They were recoding them below the level of argument as something not human. Vermin. Plague. Parasite. Because here's the terrible mechanism, and it is the most important thing in this entire history. You cannot get an ordinary man, a clerk, a farmer, a father, to murder another human being's children. You can't. The conscience won't allow it.

So first you have to convince him that the thing he's killing isn't a human being's child. You have to do the dehumanizing first, in the mind, with words and images for years, until the killing feels like sanitation. The propaganda is not separate from the genocide. The propaganda is the first half of the genocide. The gas comes second. And then the spectacle. The rallies themselves.

The Nuremberg gatherings were not political conventions. They were religious rituals built for a religion with no God, but the leader. Hundreds of thousands of bodies arranged in geometric blocks across an enormous field. The banners, the torches, the eagles, the drums. Hitler's architect, Albert Speyer, designed something for the night rallies that he called the Cathedral of Light. He took 130 anti-aircraft searchlights, the kind meant to catch enemy bombers, and he stood them in a ring pointing straight up into the dark. and the beams rose miles into the sky and made walls of light,

a vast luminous temple with no roof and no walls but light, and the crowd stood inside it, feeling something that felt like the holy. Spear himself, who was no fool and no innocent, later admitted it might have been the only architecture he ever created that was genuinely beautiful, and it was beautiful in service of the worst thing human beings have ever done. That's propaganda at its summit. not an argument, an experience of transcendence, manufactured, engineered, aimed.

There was the newspaper Dare Sturmer, run by a thug named Julius Stryker, that ran pornographic blood libel filth against the Jews on every front page, and was posted in glass cases on street corners, so even people who'd never buy it would absorb the cartoons walking past. There were the book burnings in 1933, students hurling tens of thousands of volumes into bonfires while a crowd cheered, burning the work of Jewish authors and pacifists, and anyone whose ideas the new order couldn't tolerate.

There was the capture of the young, the Hitler youth for the boys, and the League of German Girls for the Girls. So the regime had the children for hours every day, building the worldview into them before they were old enough to have any defense against it. Get them early enough and you don't have to convince them of anything later. You just have to remind them of what they've always known. And before the machine could capture anything,

it had to capture the state itself. And for that, it needed a crisis. And if a crisis didn't arrive on its own, then a crisis could be seized the moment it appeared. In February of 1933, just weeks after Hitler became chancellor, and before his grip was secure, the German parliament building, the Reichstag, burned. A young Dutch communist was caught at the scene,

and to this day historians argue about how much the Nazis knew in advance or whether they simply seized a gift that fell into their laps. But there's no argument about what they did with it. Within a day, they had the fire framed as the opening shot of a communist uprising, a national emergency, and they used that manufactured terror to push through an emergency decree that suspended civil liberties across all of Germany. Free speech, free press, the right to gather,

The protection from arrest without cause, gone, overnight, in the name of security against an enemy they'd conjured to twice its real size. The propaganda of fear is the master key. Frightened people badly enough and they will hand you the very freedoms you came to take, and they will thank you for keeping them safe. Then watch how the same machine could change its whole face when the audience changed. In the summer of 1936, the Olympic Games came to Berlin, and the world was watching. and Goebbels understood that the world watching was a different audience than the Germans at home. So the regime cleaned itself up for the cameras. The vicious anti-Semitic newspapers were pulled from the kiosks for the duration.

The ugly signs that bar Jews from the parks and the shops came down along the routes the foreign visitors would travel. The brutality got painted over, just for the season, so that the journalists and the tourists would go home and tell their own countrymen that the stories about Germany were exaggerated, that the place was orderly and modern and not so frightening after all. It was a stage set. Most of the visitors never saw behind it,

and the lie worked on them precisely because they believed they were seeing the real thing with their own eyes. The most powerful deception is the one a person thinks he discovered for himself. And then there's the part of the Nazi machine that I find more chilling than all the rest, because it's the quietest.

it isn't the searchlights or the screaming rallies, it's the language. There was a Jewish professor of languages named Victor Klemperer, who survived inside Germany through the whole nightmare, and he kept a secret diary, and in it he studied the way the regime slowly poisoned the German language itself, word by word, until ordinary people were thinking the regime's thoughts without knowing it, just by opening their mouths to speak their own tongue.

He gave it a name, the language of the Third Reich. And the most evil work that language did was the work of euphemism. The soft, clean word laid gently over the monstrous thing. The murder of the Jews of Europe was not called murder. It was called the final solution. The deportation of whole families to the gas was called resettlement or evacuation. The killing itself in the bureaucratic memos of the men who organized it

was called special treatment. They built an entire vocabulary of fog so that the clerks and the engineers and the railway schedulers could do the work of genocide while never once writing down a word that named the thing they were doing. That's propaganda turned all the way inward. Not propaganda aimed at convincing you of something, but propaganda aimed at letting you not notice what your own hands are doing. The euphemism is the anesthetic. It lets the hand do what the heart could never knowingly approve. And when the war finally turned against them, The machine simply changed the message and kept right on running.

By 1943, after the catastrophe at Stalingrad swallowed an entire German army, Gerbil stood up in a packed sports arena in Berlin and gave the most infamous speech of his life, working a hand-picked crowd into a frenzy and demanding of them, do you want total war? Do you want a war more total and more radical than anything you can imagine? And the crowd roared back yes, yes, yes, exactly as he'd planned it. and the cameras caught every second, and he turned a military disaster into a fresh wave of fanatical commitment.

He admitted in private that the crowd was so far gone that if he'd ordered them to jump out the windows, they'd have done it. He knew. He always knew. The frenzy was manufactured, and he was the man manufacturing it, and every person in those seats believed the roar came straight from his own free heart.

That was the machine. Total, intimate, beautiful. and aimed at the murder of millions. When we say the word propaganda and we picture the worst, this is what we're picturing, and we're right to. There has never been anything else quite like it. I want to be absolutely clear about that

before I turn the camera around. Nothing I'm about to tell you about my own country belongs in the same moral category as the thing that built the Cathedral of Light to sell a genocide. But the tools. Watch the tools. When America went to war against that,

machine. It built a machine of its own. In the summer of 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt created the Office of War information. Its job was to shape American morale, sell war bonds, get women into the factories, and explain to a confused and frightened public why their sons were dying on islands they'd never heard of. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. And a lot of what the Office of War was, war information did was, frankly, the unavoidable business of a democracy fighting for its life. A country at total war has to mobilize, and mobilizing means persuading, and there's an honest version of that work. But it wasn't all honest, and it wasn't all clean. Hollywood went to war

right alongside the army. The government leaned on the studios, and the studios were happy to oblige, and out came a flood of films designed to harden the home front. Frank Capra, the great director of It's a Wonderful Life was commissioned by the Army to make a series of films called Why We Fight, seven of them, and they're masterful, and their propaganda, and Capra openly said he set out to beat the Nazis at their own game, even studying triumph of the will to learn how it was done. Walt Disney's studio turned out training films and war cartoons, including one where Donald Duck has a nightmare of life under the Nazis that won an Academy Award, and another, Education for Death.

that traced how the regime took a German boy and broke him into a killer. The voice of America went on the air in 1942, beaming the American message into occupied Europe, and that broadcast service survives to this day. And then there's the part of the American war propaganda that we don't put on the recruiting posters. The campaign against the Japanese was drenched in a racism so total, it's hard to look at now.

The enemy soldier wasn't drawn as a man. He was drawn as a buck-toothed, slant-eyed, bespectacled rat, a monkey, an insect, vermin to be exterminated. Sound familiar? It's the same move gerbils made against the Jews, the same dehumanizing recoding. And our own government and our own cartoonists and our own studios made it against the Japanese. And the German enemy never got drawn that way. Never got drawn as subhuman, because the German enemy was white. The Japanese got the vermin treatment. And that propaganda did not stay on the screen.

It walked off the screen and into the law, and the law put 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them citizens born here, behind barbed wire in camps in the desert, for the crime of having the face of the enemy our own propaganda had taught us to hate. We did that, not the Nazis, us, to our own citizens.

So already, while the war is still on, The mirror is showing us something we'd rather not see. The country fighting the propaganda machine had a propaganda machine, and it pointed some of the same dehumanizing weapons at the same kind of target, and it caged its own people on the strength of it. The scale is not the Holocaust. I'll say that until I'm hoarse. But the tool in the hand is the same tool.

And then the war ended, and the machine did not get turned off. It got turned around. The enemy stopped being Berlin and Tokyo and became Moscow, and the United States settled in for 40 years of Cold War against the Soviet Union. And the Cold War was, more than anything else, a propaganda war. It was a war of ideas, of images, of who could tell the better story about the future to the people of the world. And to fight it, America built an enormous, permanent peacetime propaganda apparatus,

the first one in its history, and a lot of it was aimed outward at foreign populations. and some of it, despite the rules, leaked back home and was aimed at us. In 1948, Congress passed a law called the Smith-Munt Act, and that law is one of the most important and least understood things in this whole story. The law authorized the government to produce and broadcast propaganda, although the polite word was information to foreign audiences. But the law also built a wall. It said that the material the government made for foreign consumption,

could not be deliberately distributed to the American people inside the United States. The lawmakers of 1948 had just watched the Nazi machine, and they understood something chilling in their bones. They understood that a government with the power to flood its own citizens with state manufactured persuasion is a government that can do to its own people what Goebbels did to the Germans. So they tried to draw a line. Propaganda for them, out there, not for us, in here. Hold on to the existence of that wall, because in our own lifetimes, that wall came down, and almost nobody noticed.

And the apparatus the country built behind that wall was not a temporary wartime measure that got packed away when the shooting stopped. It was permanent. In 1953, the government created a standing agency, the United States Information Agency, whose entire peacetime purpose was to project the American message to the rest of the world, libraries and exhibitions and films and broadcasts in dozens of languages across the globe. For the first time in its history, the United States had a permanent, funded institutional propaganda arm operating in peacetime as an ordinary organ of government.

Some of what it did was open and defensible, the honest advocacy of an open society against a closed one. But the bare existence of the thing, a standing ministry of the American message running year after year, whether the country was at war or not, would have been unthinkable to the men who founded the Republic, and it became so ordinary, so fast, that hardly anyone thought to question it at all. Behind the wall, the apparatus grew. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty went on the air, beaming the American message across the Iron Curtain into Poland and Hungary and the Soviet Union itself. For years, these stations told their audiences and the American public that they were funded by private donations from patriotic citizens,

little campaigns asking ordinary Americans to give a dollar to fight communism with truth. It was a cover story. The stations were funded and controlled secretly by the Central Intelligence Agency, and that stayed hidden until the early 1970s, when a senator and a magazine dragged it into the light. The government had been lying to the American people about the very organs it built to tell the truth to foreigners. The radio of freedom was paid for by a lie about who paid for it, and the agency went further, much further into the realm of culture itself.

There was an organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, with offices around the world that funded magazines and concerts and conferences and art shows, gathering up the leading intellectuals of the non-communist left, and giving them platforms and prestige. It published respected literary magazines that writers were proud to appear in, and it was, top to bottom, secretly financed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The writers mostly didn't know. They thought they were free intellectuals having free arguments, and they were, in a sense.

But the stage they stood on had been built by a spy agency that had decided which arguments deserved a stage. Historians still debate how far it went, and some of the bolder claims, about the agency promoting certain styles of painting as a weapon, deserve a careful and skeptical eye. But the core fact is not in dispute, because the agency itself eventually admitted it. American intelligence spent years secretly shaping the cultural and intellectual life of the free world, deciding from the shadows which free voices got amplified. Freedom of thought, brought to you by a covert subsidy you weren't allowed to know about.

And that same Edward Bernays, the man who opened this whole story, selling cigarettes in an Easter parade, was busy in those very years too, and his work shows you how seamlessly the commercial machine and the government machine fed each other. One of Bernays' biggest clients was the United Fruit Company, the giant that controlled vast plantations across Central America and treated whole countries as private estates. In the early 1950s, the elected government of Guatemala, under a reformer named Hacobo Arbans,

began a land reform that threatened the country, company's idle holdings, and United Fruit went to Bernays. He ran a long, patient campaign in the American press to paint Arbens, not as a reformer, but as a communist, a Soviet beachhead in the Western Hemisphere. A red dagger pointed at the heart of the United States. He organized press junkets for American reporters, fed them, planted stories, and manufactured the impression of a gathering crisis. And in 1954, the Central Intelligence Agency overhauled,

overthrew the elected government of Guatemala, and the propaganda groundwork that helped make the American public comfortable with it had been laid by the father of public relations, working on behalf of a fruit company. The coup plunged Guatemala into decades of civil war and tens of thousands of dead. The line from the torches of freedom in the Easter parade to the bodies in the Guatemalan highlands runs through the same pair of hands. Always the same technique.

Find the feeling. Print the villain. and let the public talk itself into the thing the powerful already wanted. You'll hear people throw around a single dramatic name for it. Operation Mockingbird, the neat, all-powerful master program with that catchy name is partly a later invention, dramatized and exaggerated across the internet until it's lost its shape. But strip away the mythology and the documented core is real and it's ugly. We know it's real because the United States Congress proved it.

In the middle of the 1970s, after years of scandal, the Senate convened a committee under Senator Frank Church to investigate the intelligence agencies, and what the Church Committee found and published is on the record forever. The Central Intelligence Agency had relationships with hundreds of journalists and dozens of news organizations. It had reporters on its payroll. It planted stories. It used the cover of legitimate news to move its messages and to gather its information. A reporter named Carl Bernstein, one of the two men who broke Watergate, later documented much of it. The American Free Press, the thing we hold up as the great difference between us and the totalitarians,

had been quietly penetrated and used by the secret police of its own government. Not the whole press. Not every paper. But enough. More than enough. That's the foreign side and the gray zone. Now I have to take you into the worst of the domestic record. the place where the American government turned the tools of psychological warfare directly and deliberately on its own citizens, on Americans who had broken no law for the crime of disagreeing with their government. And its name was Cointel Pro. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, under J. Edgar Hoover, ran a set of secret operations from the mid-1950s into the early 1970s under the heading Counterintelligence Program,

which got shortened to Cointel Pro. The stated purpose in the Bureau's own internal language was to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize American political movements the Bureau didn't like. Not foreign agents, American citizens. The targets included the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women's movement, Native American activists, and above all, the black freedom struggle in every form, from the nonviolent church-based movement to the Black Panthers. and the methods were straight out of the playbook we've been describing this whole time.

The Bureau forged letters and mailed them to provoke violence between rival groups, hoping the groups would kill each other and save the government the trouble. It planted false stories in the press to destroy reputations. It sent anonymous poison letters to the spouses of activists to wreck their marriages. It manipulated, infiltrated, and lied systematically as a matter of policy for years. And then there's the single most infamous thing the Bureau ever did. And it's something I've shared on this show before in a previous episode. Because it is the American version of the Abyss.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation targeted Martin Luther King Jr. It wiretapped him. It bugged his hotel rooms. It surveilled him for years. And in 1964, the Bureau took recordings it claimed were of King's private life and packaged them up with an anonymous letter and mailed the package to King. The letter, the government's own letter, called him a fraud and an evil creature, and told him there was only one thing left for him to do.

And the clear meaning of the letter, written by agents of the United States government, was that Martin Luther King Jr. should kill himself, the man who would win the Nobel Peace Prize. The government of the free world wrote to him and tried to drive him to suicide. We know this because it was uncovered, because the church committee dragged it into the light, because in 1971, a small group of activists broke into a bureau office in a Pennsylvania town and stole the files and mailed them to the newspapers, and only then did the country learn what its own secret police had been doing to its own people in the dark.

That's not the Holocaust. But don't tell me it isn't the same family of evil, the same conviction that the people are children to be managed and that troublesome citizens are vermin to be neutralized. The same willingness to use the levers of deception and fear against, against human beings who done nothing but speak. The man who built the Cathedral of Light and the men who wrote the suicide letter to Dr. King were drinking from the same poisoned well.

The dose was wildly different. The well was the same. Now let me take you to war again, because the next great chapter of American propaganda is a chapter of war justified by lies. And it's a chapter that repeats and repeats and repeats, like a bad dream that the country can't seem to wake up from. Vietnam. In August of 1964, the American government told the public that North Vietnamese boats had attacked United States Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in international waters, without provocation,

twice. The second attack, the one on the 4th of August, was the one that mattered, the one President Johnson took to the nation and to Congress, and Congress responded by passing the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which handed the president a blank check to wage war in Southeast Asia. Tens of thousands of American boys and millions of Vietnamese would die under the authority of that resolution. The second attack almost certainly never happened. The men on the ships were reacting to ghosts on their radar in bad weather, phantom signals, and the cables they sent back even at the time were full of doubt and confusion. The administration knew the reports were shaky. It went to the country and told the country a clean, hard, confident story of unprovoked aggression

anyway, because it wanted the war and the murky truth wouldn't sell it. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Decades later, the National Security Agency's own declassified historians concluded that the August 4th attack did not occur. The Secretary of Defense, who took the country to war on it, Robert McNamara, lived long enough to express his own doubts. A war that swallowed more than 50,000 American lives was sold to the American people on an event

that didn't happen. And it kept going, all through that war. The military ran daily press briefings in Saigon that the reporters came to call the five o'clock follies, because the official numbers and the official optimism had so little to do with the war the reporters could see with their own eyes out in the field. The body counts were inflated because the body count had become the measure of success, so the measure got gamed, the way every measure gets gamed once it becomes the target. The public was told year after year that there was light at the end of the tunnel, that the enemy was on the ropes, and it wasn't true, and the men running the war increasingly knew it wasn't true. We know how deep the deception ran because of one man, Daniel Ellsberg,

who worked inside the war machine and copied a secret internal history of the war, the Pentagon papers, and gave it to the press in 1971. That secret history, the government's own honest account written for itself showed that administration after administration had lied to the public about the war, about its origins, its conduct, and its prospects for years. The government's private truth and its public story were two different documents. That's the definition of the thing we're talking about. And the deception in Vietnam wasn't only the one big strategic lie told to Congress in the Gulf of Tonkin. It ran all the way down into the daily texture of the war. The military dropped billions of propaganda leaflets over the countryside,

ran loudspeaker units along the tree lines, broadcast ghost voices into the jungle at night to frighten superstitious enemy soldiers with the whales of the unavenged dead, and ran a program of selective assassination and interrogation in the villages that was sold to the public. On the rare occasions it was mentioned at all, in language scrubbed clean of what it actually was. The gap between what the government said and what the country

country could see for itself grew so wide that the press gave it a name, the credibility gap, and it never really closed again. Something broke in those years in the relationship between the American people and their government, a trust that had survived two world wars, and it broke because the people finally caught the government lying about life and death on a scale they could not unsee. You'd think a lesson like that would stick. It didn't. It never does.

Now jump forward. 1990. Another example that I've talked about before. But bears repeating. The first war against Iraq, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The American public was uneasy about going to war over a faraway oil kingdom. And then a 15-year-old girl appeared before a congressional caucus, identified only as Naira,

and gave tearful testimony that she had personally seen Iraqi soldiers storm into a Kuwaiti hospital, pull premature babies out of their incubators and leave them on the cold floor to die. It was devastating. It was sited on the floor of the Senate. The president repeated it. It helped tip a divided country toward war. It wasn't true. The girl was not a random witness.

She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and the testimony had been arranged and coached by a giant American public relations firm, Hill and Nolton, which had been hired by a group funded by the Kuwaiti government, to sell the war to America. The incubator story was a fabrication, manufactured by a public relations firm, the direct professional descendants of Edward Bernays, and fed to the United States Congress

and the American people to grease the path to war. Bernays again. The line runs unbroken from the torches of freedom in the Easter parade to the babies on the cold hospital floor that never happened. The technique is identical. Find the emotional image that bypasses the reason and inject it.

And then, because apparently we never learn, it happened again, bigger, costlier in our own century. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq and the central justification, repeated by the president and the vice president and the secretary of state, and pushed out across every television network for months, was that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological and possibly nuclear weapons, and that he was an imminent threat to the American people. The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, a man whose credibility was the most precious asset the administration had, went before the United Nations in February of 2003, and laid out the case, the aluminum tubes for centrifuges, the mobile biological weapons laboratories, the whole

architecture of menace, holding up a little vile to dramatize how small an amount of anthrax it would take to kill. Almost none of it was true. The aluminum tubes were not for nuclear centrifuges. The story of the mobile bioweapons labs came from a single Iraqi defector. A source the German intelligence service had codenamed curveball, a man who later admitted on the record that he had made the whole thing up because he wanted to bring down Saddam's government. And the American case had been built on his fabrication, even though serious analysts had warned that he was a fabricator. There were forged documents about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Nigeria. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

None were found because there were none to find. A war that killed something on the order of 100,000 human beings and more, that destabilized a region for a generation, was sold to the American people on a foundation that turned out to be partly bad intelligence, and partly the deliberate motivated assembly of a frightening story out of scraps that wiser heads inside the government already doubted. And the war came wrapped in smaller, sharper pieces of manufactured story. Each one engineered for the emotional punch. There was Jessica Lynch, a young soldier whose capture and rescue early in the war was sold to the public as a Hollywood

tale of a girl who went down fighting and was snatched from an enemy hospital in a daring raid. Lynch herself, to her enormous credit, came home and said it was not true, that she hadn't fired a shot because her weapon jammed, that the hospital staff had actually tried to help her, that the dramatic rescue had been staged for the cameras, and that she was sick of being used as a symbol for a story that didn't happen. There was Pat Tillman, the football star who walked away from millions of dollars in the National Football League to enlist after the September 11th attacks, and who was killed in Afghanistan, and whose death was sold to the public as a heroic stand against the enemy, complete with a posthumous medal.

The truth, which the military knew almost immediately and concealed from his own family for weeks, was that Pat Tillman was killed by his own side. Friendly fire. They knew, and they wrote a heroic fiction over the top of it, because the fiction was useful and the truth was not. And they let his family stand at his funeral, believing a lie the army had already disproven. And over all of it flew the banner.

In May of 2003, a few weeks into the invasion, the president landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier off the coast of California in a flight suit. And behind him, strung across the ship's tower for the cameras, hung an enormous banner that read, Mission Accomplished, and he stood there and declared that major combat operations in Iraq were over. The war would grind on for eight more years. Thousands more Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would die after the mission was officially accomplished. It was a photograph, staged on a warship, engineered for one triumphant image to lead the evening news, and it worked for exactly as long as it took reality to catch up to it, which is the half-life of every image like it.

And when the weapons of mass destruction never turned up, when the entire stated reason for the war dissolved into empty desert, almost no one who had sold that war paid any price at all. The handful of people who'd been right and warned against it stayed marginal, ignored, unpromoted. The people who had been catastrophically, bloodily wrong, stayed right there on the television as respected experts, advising the country soberly on the next war. That's the part that should chill you to the bone, not just that the lie was told, that telling it costs the liars nothing, and being right cost the truth tellers their seat at the table. In 2008, a reporter named David

Barstow published an investigation that won the Pulitzer Prize. He revealed that the Pentagon had recruited a stable of retired generals and colonels, dozens of them. The same men you saw every night on the cable news channels introduced as independent military analysts. Men the public trusted precisely because they seemed to be neutral experts with no axe to grind. The Pentagon had been secretly briefing these men, feeding them talking points, flying them around, treating them in the Pentagon's own internal phrase as message force multipliers,

many of them had undisclosed financial interests in the war contracts they were helping to sell. The independent experts on your television, telling you what to think about the war, were running the government's lines, and you were never told. That is not foreign propaganda. That is the Office of War information come home. The Creel Committee's four-minute men in suits and ties on cable news. The state-manufactured message piped straight into the American living room. Exactly the thing the Smith-Munt Wall was built to prevent, and it worked because nobody knew the wall had a hole in it. And then quietly, in 2012, Congress took the wall down on purpose. A provision tucked into the annual defense bill, the Smith-Munt Modernization Act, rewrote the old rule. The

material the government produces to inform and persuade foreign audiences could now, legally, be made available inside the United States to Americans. The defenders of the change said it was just about transparency, about letting Americans see what their government was saying abroad in the age of the internet, and there's a version of that argument that's reasonable. But the line that the survivors of the Second World War had drawn in their bones, the line that said a free government does not deliberately aim its propaganda machine at its own citizens. That line got erased, and it got erased with almost no public debate,

because by then, the public had been trained for a hundred years, not to notice these things at all. And listen to how the country learned to talk about its own wars, because Victor Klemperer's lesson did not stay behind in Germany. When American bombs killed people who weren't soldiers, we didn't call it killing the innocent. We called it collateral damage. When the country tortured its prisoners, drowning them and freezing them and breaking their minds, it wasn't called torture. It was called enhanced interrogation.

when it killed a man with a missile fired from a drone on the far side of the planet, off a list, with no charge and no trial. It was a targeted strike, a kinetic action, a signature. The same fog, Klemperer watched roll across the German language rolled right across our own. The soft, clean, bureaucratic word lay gently over the bleeding thing so that the clerks and the lawyers and the public could go about their day, without ever once having to look directly at what was being done in their name. The euphemism is the anesthetic.

It worked in Berlin and it works in Washington. And it works because it was designed to work on the same animal. And the animal is us. Propaganda started as a word for spreading the faith. It became the name for the most efficient murder operation in human history. The machine that built a temple of light over a death cult and recoded a whole people as vermin so that ordinary men could be talked into feeding children into ovens.

And the techniques that machine used, the repetition, the big lie, the dehumanizing image, the manufactured spectacle, the capture of the young, the occupation of the inner ear, were not unique to Germany and were not invented in Germany. They were lying around in the open. The men who built the American century used them too, to sell wars that were sold on lies in 1917 and 1964 and 1990 in 2003. And to spy on and disrupt and try to destroy American citizens who'd committed no crime but conscience.

And to put the government's words in the mouths of men, the public was told, were independent. And finally, to tear down the legal wall that was supposed to keep all of it pointed away from us. I am not telling you the United States is Nazi Germany. It is not. It was not. and the men who died to stop the real thing deserve better than that cheap and stupid equation. The scale of the horror is not comparable, and I will not let it be flattened.

But I am telling you something I think is more frightening than the easy comparison, because the easy comparison lets you off the hook. The easy comparison says the evil was over there, in them, in a foreign people with a foreign madness, and it died in a bunker in 1945. The harder truth is that the machine was never a German machine. It was a human machine. The levers work on everybody.

They worked on the Germans in their kitchens with their little brown radios. And they have worked on Americans in their living rooms with the cable news on. And they are working on you and me right now, today, through a glowing rectangle that knows more about how to capture your attention and steer your fear than Goebbels ever dreamed of knowing. Because that's the new machine. and it's the most powerful one ever built. And the most disturbing thing about it

is that there's no gerbils sitting at the center of it, pulling the levers. There doesn't have to be. The people's receiver had to be designed and subsidized and distributed and tuned by a ministry full of men. The phone in your pocket tunes itself, to you, personally, learning a little more every single day

about exactly which outrage holds your eye a half-second longer and then feeding you more of it, because the longer it holds you, the more it earns. The Little Brown Radio pushed one message at 30 million people. The machine in your hand pushes a different, custom-built message at each of 2 billion people. Every one of them shaped precisely to the private fears and resentments it is quietly measured in that one person and no other. Hostile governments run whole armies of fake accounts through it to set us tearing at each other's throats. Domestic operators flood it with manufacturing.

grassroots movements that were bought and paid for by people who never show their faces. And the old wall, the one the men of 1948 built to keep the propaganda outside the house, isn't just breached now. It's beside the point. The propaganda doesn't come from outside the house anymore. It lives in your pocket. It sleeps on your nightstand. And it's the first thing your hand reaches for in the dark before your eyes are even open. The faith that the word propaganda was invented to spread is gone. I don't believe anyone's coming to save us from ourselves. No God and no government and no benevolent expert in a far-off office deciding what we're allowed to know for our own good. What I believe in is evidence. I believe in the stubborn, unglamorous, deeply

unfashionable act of asking who is telling me this, and why, and what they want me to feel, and what they're hoping I won't check. I spent 16 years learning that the official story is a draft and the most disturbing history is not the history of the men who lied it's the history of how easily how eagerly how gratefully the rest of us believe them the machine doesn't run on the liar it runs on us your skin