The Pete Quiñones Show - The 20th Century Episodes w/ Philos Miscellany - Complete

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

4 Hours and 11 MinutesPG-13Philo's Miscellany has a YouTube channel in which he reviews rare books.The ‘Blessed’ Life of Mr. Bernard Baruch w/ Philos MiscellanyThe Life of American Hero James Forrestal w/ Philos MiscellanyThe Life and Work of Edward L. Bernays w/ Philos MiscellanyPhilo's YouTube ChannelPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignanez show. Phyllos Miscellany hasn't been here in a while, but he's back. What's going on, Phyllos? Not much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me back on. You are welcome. I can't wait for this because there was a name that came up in the recent series I did with Stormy on the robber barons, and we never really dove into who that was.

and you had mentioned that you had a book on them, and then you started researching him and going down a rabbit hole, and it was like, hey, let's talk about this on the show. Who are we talking about today, Phylos? We are talking about a man named Bernard Baruch, but I'm not going to say it like that because it's going to get really obnoxious. So I'm just going to call him Baruch.

The book that was written about him is a hakiography, written while he was still alive. by a woman named Margaret Coyt in 1957. Mr. Baruch himself commissioned the book, and she spent seven years writing. She had access to all of his personal papers, interviewed everyone that he knew, but Baruch disliked the final product

so much that he entirely withdrew permission to access his private papers. And the author vowed never to write the biography of a living person again. But that doesn't tell you so much about who the man is. To keep it very brief, he is responsible for the mobilization of commodities and the logistics operations behind most of World War I and a good portion of World War II. And he was a close advisor to every U.S. president from Wilson all the way through to Truman before he fell out of favor with President Truman in the late 1940s and sort of retired from politics.

He was a political connection to a vast majority of any powerful people within Washington at the time, and he was responsible for gearing the wartime economies in both of those wars. He is a critical piece of understanding the American rearmament for World War I, in Moulth War II. That sounds like somebody who not only can pull strings, but, I mean, where does someone like that come from? Like, what's the, I mean, I know people know what the early life is. But what's the early life on Bernard Baruch? How did he, how did he, how he gets it to where he got? So, he was born in 1870, five years after the end of the Civil War in Camden, South Carolina, but he was not a Southern boy. His parents and his grandparents

and all of his previous lineage on both sides of the family was Jewish, and his parents were not born in the United States proper. So there's a whole thing about his Jewish lineage, which I'll get into in a bit, but he was the son of Simon Baruch, who was a surgeon in the Confederate Army, and that man as a surgeon was very involved with the Confederacy and the treatment of the wounded during the war and after the war he was a member of the KKK which would explain the prominent democratic political partisan tendency that Mr. Baruch had for his entire life

and also his connection with many other Jews throughout his career So a lot of the connections that he makes are Jews. And we can get all into that, but that's the gist of his background in the South. I think something that some people bring up sometimes is the fact that there were a lot of Jews in the South. And even like Judah Benjamin, obviously, is the most obvious one when it comes to the war and when it comes to the Southern government. that. Some people make the argument that one of the reasons why the South didn't win is because the, well, there was a, what some would call a historically subversive element in charge and in power and controlling a lot of wealth in the South. So what would you, from what you've studied, is there, can you comment on that? I can't comment generally as to it, but as to his family specifically, they were immensely wealthy for first generations. They owned several plantations. They had a columned mansion, kind of the idealic southern childhood.

They had a mammy, so to speak. So evidently, the family's fortunes were not destroyed in the war as much as many. other Southerners. So I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions from that. So when he's making connections and he's growing power, how is he, how is he accumulating his power to get to the point where he can influence presidents and basically have a good part in controlling the two biggest wars of all time? So the rise is pretty interesting. He's a smart man. a good boxer.

At age 10, he moves up to New York City, and at the time, Jews were not allowed in the Ivy League's in the United States. They were simply forbidden from attending. And instead of going to an Ivy League, he went to City University in New York, which was the primary pathway for very powerful Jews to get a college degree and make business network connections. And there was a sort of funneling effect,

where the nation's wealthiest and most powerful ones would go to this college, generally on their own merit. They had kind of uniquely as far as colleges go, universal entrance exams that Jews would go through and get on to the program. But he also meets very interesting people when he's at City College. He befriends a man called Lewis Rothschild that might come up later.

You know, I'm sure your audience knows about the Rothschilds. He also meets a man called Josephus Daniels. And after college, sort of the network of people he's meeting include people like Guggenheim. And to get back to kind of his time in school a little bit here, he is a very athletic guy. most Jews in the 1890s that were were kind of known for boxing strangely enough this is something that's not

widely known today very talented boxer he's a very tall guy for a Jew non-Jewish sources will say six feet tall Jewish sources will say 6 foot 3 to kind of compensate he goes in 1890

to where his parents were born in Schveilsen in East Prussia to meet his grandparents and there's a few interesting lines here about his Jewish background that I'll kind of read. This is right out of his biography. Quote, when he saw the handsome Prussian hussars and nice uniforms and scarred faces,

something tightened within him. For his was the heritage of 1848, and this was the hateful militarism from which his father had fled. And there's another interesting anecdote, which is that he meets his grandparents, who are still living there, and his grandfather takes

him into the closet and shows him a human skull that has writings of various languages on it like Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, and German, and I quote, even tongues long forgotten and spoken no more. This was the genealogy

of the Baruch family. Descended from the Baruch who was in Jeremiah's scrolls in the Babylonian captivity. So there's probably some Kabbalistic magic going on or some kind of weird past background because as your audience may or may not know

I was raised Jewish and I've never met another Jewish family that has a skull in the closet. Very unusual. I want to talk a little bit now about how he makes his fortune. I'll keep it brief. He joins a small firm on Wall Street and he speculates on rubber, gets very wealthy. He's a a millionaire by the time he's 30 in 1905. And he starts making a whole bunch of connections. And he's known for getting people what they need, when they need it. So he's described in the book as not necessarily the front man of industry like a Carnegie or a JP Morgan, but he knew the key players in back places. One such example of this is there was a man named Joseph Daniels who needed a whole bunch of zinc.

And in order to facilitate this connection for the New Jersey zinc company, he met with some very strange people to facilitate raw commodities. And later on in his career, this back dealing becomes a tremendous strength of his. Later on, he's very successful in the commodity trading, and he ends up getting very, very close also, with key members of the Democratic Party. I'm thinking specifically of a guy called Colonel House,

who I believe you've talked about before, Pete, maybe briefly. But for those who don't know, Colonel House was kind of the go-to man in Washington between 1912 and 1918, and he was kind of the one running the show for Wilson, if it wasn't for his wife's involvement, President Wilson's wife at the end of the war.

So it gets very close with Colonel House. He gets very close with the president and chairman of the DNC, a guy named William McAdoo, and all these connections that he's making lobby very hard for Baruch's involvement in politics. The man who was kind of his mentor, McAdoo, was Wilson's key man and married Wilson's daughter in 1914 for his second marriage.

It was very close, connections. That man was the Treasury Secretary at the outbreak of World War I. In addition, and this is the last kind of connection, and then I'll go into his World War I career, Baruch was also friends with Justice Louis Brandeis, who also supported Baruch's career progression to President Wilson as well. So I don't believe it's a matter of coincidence that every powerful Jew in the Wilson administration was known to Baruch through his time at City College in New York and also his business connections prior to World War I. So you had mentioned, and I know you said, we talked about this a little bit the first time

you were on that you were raised Jewish. What do you know? Of his religious involvement. No, I'm talking about you. Oh, me personally? Yeah, you mentioned that you were raised Jewish. Yeah, so my background, born and raised Jewish, went through the whole thing, briefed me law, B'h Mitzvah.

I lived for a few years in Israel. And then eventually I recognized that Christ is the Messiah. And you can't remain a Jew if you decide and know that Christ is the Messiah. So I became a Christian,

married a Christian woman. My wife and I are Orthodox Christians. So I no longer believe in Judaism. But I could tell you that the patron Dinged network of things is very powerful even today as far as getting into places that you wouldn't be able to get into otherwise having career advancement.

You know, I know that a lot of business dealings and a lot of things happen over Shabbat dinners. And, you know, there's, it's, it's very, I think also a lot of my early career success, which I won't go into, I owe to my Jewish background. the education that I got, the people that I met. I think that's that's that's kind of the strength, the in-group preferences. So is that it? Is it in-group preferences or is it the high verbal IQ? Not all of us have high verbal IQs, even though I'm talking a lot. It's, no, it's, it's also, it's a bifurcation.

It's a split between being an ethnicity, and being a religion. So whenever you need to, you can switch between the two. You can sort of play up the ethnic card, right? So, for example, I could claim that I'm white or that I'm Jewish selectively. Or it's a religious thing that I have some kind of mystical connection with the divine being chosen.

I remember as a kid, part of the kid's books that we would read in the synagogue would have, like, the Prague Golem and stuff is like this avatar of Jewish sentiment against bigotry. And, you know, when you're a kid, you don't really question any of this stuff. But, you know, I lived in Israel for a few years. It's a religious ethno state. And, you know, when you do that long enough, you know, it's kind of like, yeah, and maybe regular Joe Schmo in America should kind of have this too.

you know, these connections, these benefits, these opportunities. And maybe they should be able to be proud of their heritage and believe in their own narrative and their understanding of history. Like maybe they shouldn't be shamed for that intrinsically. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I know that from reading Shahak, once a Jew does start professing Christ, their life in Israel is pretty much over. Oh, toast. Like, my rabbi, like, wouldn't even speak to me. Like, the whole, the whole Jewish side of the family, like, ostracized me. And it's, uh, yeah, you know, it's this weird thing because, like, you're dead to them. And for, for what? Exactly. Like, you're still ethnically Jewish. And, uh, the funny part is, like, 80% of Jews or something, don't even believe in God. And, uh, you kind of, that, you know, that's, uh, the whole thing. I mean, oh my gosh, it's just a mess. It's just a, it's just a, it's just a,

Total, total mess. All right. Let's get back to Mr. Baruch, since we know that you don't have any, in your family doesn't have any skulls hiding in the closet. Yeah. Yeah. So let's get into World War I because that's, when somebody has that much power to do the kind of things he did, we need some explanations for that. So he is appointed by Wilson to head the War Industries Board. And I'm not an economist, but the best I can figure,

what the War Industries Board does in World War I is they acquire raw commodities for industries, and then they go in with the backing and blessing of the federal government to dictate to corporations what they're producing for the war effort. and because they're the federal government, they can control the commodity supply chain and the production and the logistics of shipping the final product overseas. They're doing this for the Americans before the entry into World War I. They're doing this for the French and the British. So a lot of the material assistance that we see during World War I, the reason that the Allies were able to, to hold out so long against the central powers was because of the American logistics that were

backing them up. And that's a pretty neutral statement. But what's not a neutral statement is how he went about getting the materials and also how he profited from being in charge of this. Now, technically speaking, Wilson's executive order that created this War Industries Board stated that the chairman could not explicitly set the price of things. But if you're the man that's controlling the supply of the commodity and the demand of where it goes to, you're going to have an innate knowledge of that item's price. So he was able to strike these insane deals. One example of a deal is he talked Daniel Guggenheim into selling 45 million pounds of copper at half the market price, saving $3.7 million in 1916, $1917, which is an insane deal.

And the War Industries Board created all these facilities all over the country to coordinate the food, the fuel, the railway administration, the shipping board, the war trade board. Every decision of the commodities and the production of the economy and wartime passed by him, But this was not something that was created by an act of Congress. And, you know, he was also backed up by all of Wilson's cabinet and Colonel House as well. Let's see here. So word on the street, even during World War I, was that Bernard Baruch was profiteering from the War Industries Board. And he was.

it's very difficult to know, and I believe that before Baruch himself in this biography ordered the stripping out of all details of personal correspondence, that there was probably some pretty damning stuff in there. But one thing that stayed in the book was that in 1917, he wrote a check for $5 million worth of bonds for the first Liberty loan drive. As you know, wars are very expensive,

and there's three main ways you can finance war, taxation, borrowing, and the expedience of printing money. So in World War I under his plan, according to the Fed's website, the Federal Reserve, that is, the government relied on a mix of one-third new taxes and two-thirds borrowing from the general population. The securities were issued by the Treasury, but the Federal Reserve and its member banks conducted the bond sales. They taxed the richest and exempted the poor. The highest marginal rate eventually reached 77% on incomes over $1 million. This was part of an effort to not only sell the bonds, but to sell the war. So I want to break this down because that sounds very financial and technical.

But the way that I perceive it is that the federal government is shutting down private industry and excessively taxing very wealthy people. And yes, it funds the war, but it also destroys an aristocratic class of people that had existed and made their money outside of the federal government in private corporations. Baruch during the war had a system of interlocking committees and a single controllable outlet for each separate commodity.

Washington put forth the demand, and industry gives out the supply. So, you know, in terms of profiteering, you just have to look at the facts in the book. Baruch was working with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who boasted in 1920. He had broken enough laws during the war to go to jail for 900 years. In June, 1918, there was such a shortage of vital steel that the United States steal, their net income for 1917 in the previous year, was 224,000. million with dividends of $7.62 a common share.

So just to make that make sense, these numbers were not reached again by this company until 1954. So somebody's making a whole shit ton of money. Excuse my language. And I want to also point to some other very interesting profiteering and economic machinations that are going on for this. So one thing that you have to supply in warfare is, a whole lot of ordinance, and Baruch was the man for explosives.

His big thing was nitrates, and nitrates have a dual use. You can use them in explosives, but you also need them for fertilizer. The Allies encountered a situation where most nitrate production they were getting was from Chile. German-owned nitrate facilities in Chile, as well as Chile, having their gold reserves in Germany. So to seize these German-owned nitrate factories would violate the trading with the Enemy Act that they had set. And so what happened was every allied buyer of nitrates just withdrew from the Chilean market for three months. And that left Chile with no ability to sell their nitrate. The country almost was on the verge of starvation.

and then the Allies returned to the market and bought their nitrates at four and one-eighth cents a pound, which is just dirt cheap for nitrate. A very interesting thing. I know that Stormy mentioned the DuPont family. Baruch screwed over the DuPont company and required them to turn over all nitrates to the government when they had made a previous deal with Chile before this strategy was in effect. So the way I kind of conceive of this big picture is they're kind of squeezing the old aristocracy of all of their money, and they're federalizing a lot of these different industries. He also did the same supply and demand machinations on Southern Cotton.

To go like, and let me go, let me know if this gets like way too granular. Stormy also mentioned that in America in the 19th century, there were these factories that would produce perhaps something. as small as a niche little button. And that industry, those types of industries, were totally destroyed in the 20th century. And I believe that this is the root of how they began to get destroyed. Within the book, it details that war conservation had reduced styles, varieties, and colors of clothing. It had standardized sizes of machinery. It had outlawed 250 different types of plow models, 755 types of drills,

232 different types of buggy wheels. Nearly 6,000 different shapes and sizes of pocket knives vantaged from country stores. So what does that mean? That means that like your town pocket knife factory is toast because there's a big one near the city that's been federalized for the war effort that can produce a standardized one

at the government's request for the military. And that kills a lot of, of very small industries. But it has like a parallel benefit. And it doesn't go out of, it doesn't close after the war ends. No, not at all. This keeps going.

This is something where like most people on the right know that Japan really industrialized after World War II. They know that the Soviet Union really industrialized. and China during the cultural revolution kind of failed, but did a lot of different things to modernize their economy. But this is sort of how it happened really within the United States as far as the synchronization of both state and private industry. Previously, these were very separate things.

But through the coordination of the central government in the U.S. and the war effort, it totally changed the economic landscape. Here's an example. In 1914, the U.S. produced 591 tons of chromite. Into 1918, at the end of the war, it produced 60,000 tons. So similar to World War II, we were the only economy that was in this position at scale. There was a kind of international austerity that gripped the world. France couldn't give up its gold for the American cars,

and Germany had no gold in few raw markets. materials left. So I want to get into briefly the Paris Peace Conference and why I think that this man did some really evil actions during his lifetime. So Bernard Baruch was named the Peace Commission at the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919. By executive order, $150,000 or $2.7 million was put at his personal disposal to assemble a staff and do what he wished. So he supported Wilson's having France seized Germany's coal in the roar. The plan from Mr. Baruch was to, and in these proceedings, he was considered the voice of reason, if you can believe this. The plan was to let Germany build up enough industry to just be bled further financially.

as Pete's mentioned probably on previous streams, but to the audience's knowledge, the average German citizen at this time was consuming just eight or 900 calories a day. That's starvation level. American soldiers were eating steaks, and British soldiers at the time threatened to open mutiny. They were seeing children wandering around the streets starving.

Baruch continued the blockade along with other people in Wilson's administration. When Herbert Hoover did a count as president, looking back on it, he assessed that three and a half million German children were of subnormal physical stature due to malnutrition due to this blockade. Baruch was also in favor of an army of occupation of the Allies remaining for 20,000, 25 years in Germany and the Ruhr as well. Just completely devastating Germany. And that I do think is an evil act.

Yeah, but the question, it always comes back to my favorite question of why. Well, I believe it was to personally, financially enrich Beruch. and a lot of other Jews and a lot of other wealthy and powerful people in Europe and the United States. Is that just by basically stealing all of their natural resources? I know that Italy and the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia at the time had control of southern parts of Prussia, obviously Poland had parts of parts of Prussia and is that what that just basically while you're starving these people, you're fleecing and taking their forests and deforestation, things like that. Totally.

And they would do stuff like withhold the sale of nitrates like I mentioned very briefly earlier. So on the one hand, they're getting carved up and they're. not able, Germany isn't able, to produce materials, and let's say they can bring a car to market somehow. They are now dealing with an American industry, which has spent the last four years standardizing and making the cheapest possible and highest quality car. And there's just no way on the macro scale that you can compete with that. It stuns me that nobody at the the Paris Peace Conference really was able to

kind of see the long-term implications of this. I mean, a few people were. But generally, like, I mean, it's interesting because, like, the centralization of stuff with the economy is Bruce's similar playbook in World War II, which is fascinating. I mean, it's just a very similar thing.

He, you know, you have to understand also, this is speculation, you know, the man's parents were driven out of Prussia one generation prior for some reason that we don't know. And that he was, in somewhere in the lineage, there was an 1848-type communist mindset. And that, you know, he was a Democrat

and a lot of people he was hanging around, Harry Hopkins, very left-leaning people, and I think there is a general trend of resentment against Germany. I mean, in the book, it really describes it more in the 30s and 40s, but it's very strange that he writes about an 1890 going to Prussia and disliking what he sees with Prussian people. So I can't, I think you have to take a man holistically, and I think that there's all these different.

things that suggest he had a real personal animosity towards Germany. That seems to be a pattern, especially when, you know, when you see certain people within our government so intense on destroying Russia. I'll agree with that. So let's go. We're at Paris Peace Conference, quote unquote, and we're moving forward with Mr. Burr. Absolutely. So we are going to look a little bit at the

20s and then the 30s and then World War 2. There is let's, let's, I'm just, I'll crack up in the book here real quick. Two, three, 90. Baruch came under attack

in the Dearborn Independent. That's Henry Ford's newspaper. In a exquisite, exactly. Like, I don't know, like five years ago, I wouldn't have thought this, but now I'm looking at it. Just, oh, man, based. So, the scope of Jewish dictatorship in the United States,

the details of which have already been described. He wrote a friend that the outstanding man himself must expect attack and jealousy. Anti-Semitic bigotry restricted his activity in the Democratic Party. you know, but of course we know that he's doing all of his business dealings with Jews and he's making all of his money off of doing these multi, multi-million dollar deals with the Guggenheims and Josephs Daniels and Enu Brandeis and all these others. And, you know, they're then coming into these companies around the country and telling them what they should produce and how much of it they should produce.

and you know he's not like a Cincinnati's figure who just walks away at the end of the war and goes back to private business no like he continues onwards politically um in 1927

he begins to sell off all of his liquid uh I don't know money I'm not an economist so I'm probably going to screw a lot of this up he sells most of his stuff before the Great Depression and profits off of it. In 1929 in February, he points out the Coolidge and Mellon were responsible for stimulating public

participation in the stock market, which he was against. He was concerned over the lowered rates from the Federal Reserve, and he was in favor of the gold standard. He had some pretty, and again, profits off of the Great Depression. He was very close to Henry Morgenthau. And then, of course, after the Great Depression, he's advising all these people. He mostly is spending his time working with the farmers on a mass bargaining scale for, I think, trying to help out with the dust bowl circumstances that are going on. but I'm not too clear on the specifics.

Getting into, of course, the more relevant political part here, he was very close friends with FDR, going all the way back to World War I and continuing through the 1920s and 1930s. He was also Churchill's, Winston Churchill's, oldest American friend. So he kind of stays in the circle the whole time. He very much disliked the brain trust

committee or organization of group of men of the New Deal, as far as his own political views. He supported the eight-hour workday, and he put the first private money into a public housing project. One of his other opinions, especially of John Maynard Keynes, he said of economists that if they knew the rules, they would not be writing books. They would be making money. I want to transition briefly to World War II here. In the early 1930s, far earlier than people have an idea of, in 1932, Baruch starts advocating for the consolidation of rubber and steel stockpiles in the United States because he has a pretty good idea and anticipation that World War II is going to occur.

And he kind of sets up the 1930s to rearm and bolster the American wartime economy in a very similar manner to how he had conducted himself during World War I. And as we've, as, you know, I've listened to your previous streams, a lot of the United States was very isolationist and even sympathetic, perhaps, to Germany. And this was a very unusual view at the time. He was, let's see, in 1938, he meets with FDR, he knows, and he tells FDR that Germany has spent 105 million German marks rearming the country. He advises FDR that 50,000 long-range bombers should be built.

He also, in the mid and late 1930s, is building munitions factories. And as we learned in your earlier podcast and streams, these were producing non-American ammunition. And even more interesting in 1938 and 1939, he's urging Harry Hopkins to take the secretarieship of war. And Harry Hopkins did the lend lease arrangement. So that's sort of the administrative element here behind Harry Hopkins and the rearmament in the munitions. And you also have to consider that he's, again, similar theme, he's profiteering off of all of this. He's making

a whole lot of money doing this because he knows from his career all the commodity prices and all the productions that go into wartime. He suggested total embargo economically of Japan in the early 1940s, late 1930s. He believes that nothing should be sold to the enemy, that there should be no assistance given to any other nation except the United States. He was very close friends with George Marshall.

And this is something I didn't know. Most rationing in World War II, the rubber rationing, the victory gardens, the bonds, that was all done at Baruch's request. And he was very frustrated with anything going on in the economy that wasn't oriented towards wartime production. His daughter bought an airplane in 1940, and he was evidently tremendously upset about this. And he was also very opposed to the efforts of a certain James Forrestall, who I would love to do a stream on because I think he's a hero. And there's very interesting facts about him as well, very positive facts, unlike the negative facts of Mr. Baruch. To kind of sum up here, he was a troubleshooter, in a sense.

The word troubleshooter is kind of used to describe him, because he would come into the, these big bureaucracies where you'd have a corporation with a lot of power and industry, and he would use the leverage the federal government to kind of squeeze them for everything. And he was known throughout his career as going industry to industry and just basically bending them over and is responsible for a lot of the change and the federalization of the economy. I did some outside research on Mr. Baruch, separate from the main hagiography that was written about him during his lifetime. I read a little bit of the section from tragedy and hope on him, and there's another great book called the Fabian Freeway. The Fabian Freeway quote is that the phrase Colonel House is the man behind Wilson or has his hand.

and everything, that was attributed to Bernard Baruch. And in tragedy and hope, Bernard Baruch has mentioned in relation to his 1946 efforts to present a plan to the United Nations to set up an international control body for nuclear energy. He advocated for international inspection, both Soviet and American, so that the American stockpile of nuclear bombs

would be dismantled after the country. the war and that they would all be placed in the hands of this, you know, magical agency. He was also back in World War I very in favor of the League of Nations, the One World Governance Model. The Baruch plan in 1946 was rejected by the Soviet Union. And like many, many other figures that were prominent in FDR's term, he fell out of favor with Truman, and I think from reading other people's lives,

especially the life of James Forrestall, pretty much everyone got on Truman's bad side eventually. And after that, after the late 1940s, he kind of semi-retired, he would hang around in a place

called Hyde Park, where he'd sit on a bench. He was a very powerful, connected man with a lot of money. And he generally just moved back to his estate. The book was written when he was about 80 years old. It's absolutely glowing in how it describes the man.

So a lot of the coverage that I got was biased, and I think we'll never know exactly how much he profiteered off of what he was doing. However, he dies in 1965, and like many, many other people, He is forgotten about to history. We know the names of people like MacArthur and Eisenhower and Hitler and Churchill. But there were a lot of these other figures that perhaps on purpose or perhaps accidentally we no longer know about. So that kind of concludes the life of Bernard Baruch.

I was going to ask a question until you got to the end and you started. talking about like League of Nations, things like that. I was going to ask what was his, what you would say his ideology was. Did he have an ideology? It's, hmm. So, I mean, there's some free, there's some free market in there. It seems like he was probably a gold standard guy. Also, you know, the, but saying, oh, the United States, no,

one should have nuclear weapons except this one, you know, global organization is kind of insane. It's, um, I guess, so I'm, I am working from a biased biography, but, but some of those are the best, because sometimes the best biographies are biased because they're bragging about what they do in them. People brag about what they do, and it's like, and they present it as a good thing. And then you're just like, wait a minute um no no i don't think this is a good thing at all so i get the sense that he was really more of uh numbers man than anything else the book never paints him as like a orthodox new dealer i mean he's in the inner circle and he has a lot of sway and he's very close to fDR because eleanor roosevelt likes him um and

And he was for the gold standard. So he's described in economic terms in the book as conservative. But he was a staunch the whole time, he was a staunch member of the Democratic Party. He knew every major player. He would work very diligently on appointments. He didn't really have any moral scruples about working with. guys like Harry Hopkins or Colonel House. So it seems like the seedier elements,

the Democratic Party didn't really phase him. I think he, you know, there wasn't, I'm also not seeing like a particular ethnic love from him. Like when he's at the Paris Peace Conference, there's a part where Jews come up and there's like this bickering between like, for whatever reason, there's a Jewish sort of delegation there or a Jewish question that has to be settled in Poland.

And he's not really on the side of the Jews in Poland. He kind of asserts that they need to just become Poles singularly, no hyphenates. That's an interesting term at the time hyphenates for people. So it seems as though he worked with a lot of Jews. He certainly benefited from their power. He was a strident southern Democrat.

And I think also primarily, there was this weird streak of like, because he was doing so much for the U.S. economy and he was changing so many things and federalizing so many things, I really did think he, I don't know if nationalist is the word, but he was in favor of a strong America, America that would win in warfare. That was kind of his single-minded effort. And I also think as terms of ideology,

this didn't really stop his freedom of association. He had to meet with all kinds of people and politics and members of various businesses and corporations. And I'm not seeing anything in the book that really paints him as like ideologically attached to you know, the Democrats beyond, like,

the power politics of it. I don't see that he's, you know, this flaming communist or anything. But, I mean, he worked with a lot of communists and he helped out Harry Hopkins, and he is directly responsible for

communists and the New Dealers and everything else gaining a huge amount of ground in this country. Hmm. Was there any evidence that he, like, what was his opinion on the founding of Israel and Israel from 1948 forward? Did you see anything? Let me see. It'll just give me one moment, too. Actually, it might be a question.

Let me see here. So I'm looking. wonder yeah good yeah sorry let me just let me just let me just look through the index here i'm not seeing him as present so i'm actually looking at my forestall notes because forestall was in the cabinet in may of nineteen forty eight and like took notes on everything so baruch wasn't there let me see is he because like later in life like even henry morgan thou became like a financial advisor to israel and you know, there were a lot of people who just, even though Morgan Thoud, you know, died in the United States, he, immediately a lot of people like him.

Go ahead. Sorry. Again, there's like so many streams of research for this. Okay. February 3rd, 1948. Secretary of Defense, James Forrestall goes to lunch with Bernard Baruch. I'm reading this from the Forrestall Diaries. From Bernard Baruch, quote,

he took the line of advising me not to be active in this particular matter that is on Zionism, and Forrestal was against the creation of the state of Israel. So Baruch is basically telling him, stop worrying about it. And that I, Forrestal, was already identified to agree that this was not in my own interests with opposition to the United Nations policy on Palestine. Baruch, I'm just going to insert it here, Baruch said he himself did not approve of the Zionist's actions, but in the next breath said that the Democratic Party could only lose

by trying to get our government's policy reversed and said that it was a most inequitable thing to let the British arm the Arabs and for us not to furnish similar equipment to the Jews. So I can kind of clarify that statement if that makes sense. So in 1948, there's the Truman Deweil election, and both are trying to win over the support of very powerful Jews within the party. And Baruch knows that any major member of Truman's cabinet standing against the creation of Israel might compromise the Democratic. democratic parties political chances in the upcoming election by trying to change the policy, which was like kind of broadly pro-Israel.

And he was also in favor of arming the Israelis as well, Baruch was. Because, of course, I mean, and you have to just connect it to his career, like the guy made his money by arming people. Yeah, I was thinking that. It's like he doesn't necessarily have to ideologically agree with the founding of the state of Israel. But, I mean, this is a guy who made money during war. Sure, arming them is profitable. And you also have to consider that in 1948, like the Ilgun, the Haganah, these organizations that were operating in Israel, they were terrorists.

We're killing a whole lot of Brits. And that's a huge problem because, I mean, the American people are perceiving. There's not like this Schofield Bible, weird APAC style worship of Jews in 1948 in the U.S. People are looking at this and saying, like, these people are terrorists. And I think Baruch is really only concerned with that time about, the political fortunes of the Democratic Party. I mean, I think that really is his primary concern throughout his career, because that is his ability to have access to power is through that party and through those

types. Yeah, what was that thing? Yeah, it's when you take into consideration polls that were done in the late 1930s about what Americans, what Heritage Americans, what their opinions were of Jews, it wasn't good. It was, I think, 70%, as high as 80%, it didn't trust them. So what changes, what's going to change in the matter of 10 years? A lot can change in the matter of 10 years, but not much. not the public's opinion, full opinion of a group that they consider to be outsiders.

Totally. And throughout the biography, right, he's not going around the world presenting himself as a Jewish guy. He's presenting himself as a Southern Democrat. Like, that is his persona, as it's described in the book. The woman who wrote his biography previously wrote a book about John Calhoun, a very positive book. That I'd be interested in reading because I think when we were talking on the phone the other day, I said that I think Calhoun is the greatest political thinker in American history. And I've read his disquisition on government the whole thing on my podcast. It's just a great, a great thinker. And, you know, one of those guys who was like, we can't have, do this Mexican, we can't do this Mexican-American war in, in the 1840s because.

Mexicans are going to end up coming here, and they're not like us. That's very astute considering the way people understood the U.S. involvement in Mexico. Like, that's really far thinking. That's interesting stuff. I haven't really read anything about John Cahoon. Yeah, if you read his disposition on government, it's 100 pages. I mean, it's just, it's great. Another thing I think that's very interesting about Baruch,

is when you look at pictures of him, he does present as a Southern Democrat. Oh, totally. The way he wears his hair, everything. Even the manner he takes pictures, the way he takes pictures. Well, I mean, you got to like, this is kind of like,

there's a thing in Judaism where like, like the more white you look, the more you can kind of blend. The guy was six foot blue eyes, wasp looking. you know, came from like a wealthy South Carolina family. I mean, outside of the last name and going to City College, like there's really not much about him that would give him away.

And, you know, throughout his life, he never really draws attention to his Judaism at all. I never, in the whole like 900-page book, I never read about him going to synagogue. I think, let me see here. I think he, yeah, he married an Episcopalian. You know, their family was raised, their children were raised Episcopalian. Like, I don't think he ever, the Judaism thing didn't really matter much for him besides, like, business connections.

He also owned a gigantic 17,000 acre plantation in South Carolina that had Negro quarters on it. And so, you know, made like a huge. effort to help with the Southern heritage and the history there. And, you know, it's not like some defense of the man, but, you know, when you read these, like, huge biographies about people, like, you know, it's, it's not black and white, good or evil, like, you know, schemer or not. But he definitely did a lot of, he did a lot of bad stuff for sure. Yeah. I'm reminded of when you mentioned City College of New York, the libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard, he used to jokingly refer to that because it was the only school that one of the only colleges Jews could get into. He would call it circumcised citizens of New York. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Oh, man. Oh, man, that's funny.

I, yeah, no, definitely. I mean, it is like the big thing. It's like NYU kind of, very similar. But, I mean, it's just crazy when you start looking at like his, you know, in the clan, you know, a slave owner, plantation owner. I mean, it's just, yeah, it's wild stuff. I mean, and, you know, the, he was a U.S. representative to the United States Atomic Energy Commission, you know, through the brie is just amazing just amazing the things he was able to um you know is i i i refer to people like him as like they're like forest gump they show up every you know how he would always show up

at everything yeah any kind of popular thing that like yeah if you if you look at anything from like the the first half of the 20th century there bernard bruce is there yeah no it's it's kind of incredible and I think I'm a lot of it's again speculation but he was close with colonel house for like eight years straight and colonel house had this very interesting style of going about his network which was kind of he was totally unavailable except people had to come to his house and in his house he had this whole network of telephone lines that would connect to the army and connect to the navy and you could very directly access all these different politicians in a time when you had to have like a phone operator, right? So you had to have a room with a switchboard somewhere that people would

route your phone calls through. He kind of made his house into a node and also made himself very exclusive and hard to contact. And so he was like the central point of connection for all of these people. And if Mr. Baruch was working with him and knew him personally for all this time, and most of the quotes and information, the famous ones about Colonel House we know from Baruch of all people that suggests he picked up a lot of his methods. And, you know, he, you know, all the, I don't know if you want to call them anti-Semitic, but like, he was accused of profiteering off the war, which he did. He was accused of consolidating industry and putting all these companies out of business

and monopoly, and he did. and he was written about by the Dearborn Independent, and it's like every allegation they throw at him, it's kind of true. And as far as having a network of people and knowing all the most powerful people in the early 20th century, Jewish or not, he's this point of connection.

He's facilitating all these things, and he's getting these crazy rates, on everything around him. I mean, again, to bring up that example, 45 million pounds of cotton for half of copper, excuse me, during wartime, for half the market price from another Jewish person. Like, would that deal ever exist in normal circumstances?

I doubt it. And it also put a huge amount of independent businesses, smaller businesses out of commission and kind of left him and his friends in charge the American economy. You know, you have the Federal Reserve, which most people know that.

Most people that are libertarians have probably read Secrets of the Temple or the creature of Jekyll Island. And yes, the finance stuff is fascinating, but you have to look at the logistics and the materials, the physical items that were being produced and how they came about. And,

you know, the man not only had these powers during both World Wars, but he had it for the entire 1920s and 1930s through something like four other presidents. Harding, he was close with him. Calvin Coolidge, close with him,

close with Herbert Hoover, and close with FDR the whole time. So no one else, no other figure throughout that time period had that much power and connection to the presidents of the United States. no one.

And it's very interesting that this man is just kind of there and making money the whole time. And yeah, I think that to go back to your earlier point very briefly, I think that's why he's not some kind of hardline ideologue. There's a certain pragmatism where you're meeting all of these people and you're interacting with all these different top figures and you kind of have to be almost, sociopathically apolitical in order to get what you want done right and his really his only interest was uh ordinance and rearmament and federal control over corporations and supply and demand wow well i appreciate this thank you um are you ever going to do anything for your uh youtube channel you ever yeah no i have to i have i have a whole bunch of books back here and uh i have to put out some more content.

Yes. Maybe don't put out, if you're going to put it on YouTube, some of those books you may not want to cover on YouTube. It's not, it's not smart to cover those on YouTube. Yeah, very good to know. Hopefully, in the Trump, if I may, a few final points. I hope in the Trump administration censorship is not as bad and that content creators can just kind of speak more freely.

It is critical. And I think also one thing I forgot to mention at the very start of the stream is that if you look at the incoming Trump administration, it's not just the people that are going to be saying the party line and having the right opinion. It's going to be the people that have the administrative strength and the ability to muster and martial logistics and power into onshore manufacturing and to produce stuff in this country for this country. And, I mean, maybe not a man like Baruch, but, you know, the way that he went about consolidating American industry and getting everyone to sing to the same tune, I think the Trump administration would benefit tremendously from having someone who can sit down every company in the country and just make stuff happen, make manufacturing happen, make standardization happen. and restore the American economy. Well, that is yet to be seen. And of course, blackpilling over it now when, you know, nothing's been done is foolish and literally retarded.

So we're in wait and see mode now. And, I mean, everybody's picking apart every little thing that he says or anything his, you know, his appointees say. So, yeah, it's just annoying. I try to spend his little time on Twitter now, unless I'm trying to bait congressmen into admitting that they're traders to traders to the United States.

Unbelievable, unbelievable, that guy. What are they paying him? I'm so curious what they could possibly be paying him that much in money for. Did you see? Yeah, 1.1 million for, like, a Nebraska congressman, that makes no sense whatsoever. The only thing I could think of is some kind of defense contract that's like totally not publicly known, but there's no reason. Like, you know, he's looking into him, he had kind of, you know, support for the, you know,

the October 7th, whatever proclamation. You know, a lot of these like lip service moves that they do in Congress. anytime Israel does anything. But there's just like, it's, yeah, I couldn't believe what he said to you. That was unreal for sitting U.S. congressman. I think Stormy made a really good point.

He said, if you go from being a brigadier general to a congressman, that's like the biggest emotion in the world. What the hell are you doing in Congress? generals have their own fiefdoms in the military. Why are you in Congress? I would presume it would be for the money, but... But there's... You can make much more...

I don't know. Hey, maybe some people can't enrich themselves outside of Congress. Maybe they're not capable outside of that organization. You would think a brigadier general can just be appointed to the... board of like, you know, 20 different military contractors or something like that. I don't know. I find it, I find it odd. And I also find it odd that he's fighting with people on Twitter.

Yeah. If it's him. If it's him. A general is more of a staff position in the sense that, I mean, not all of them, right? Obviously, there are generals that, you know, I agree with Stormy. They say something stuff happens. But you also have to consider that something like the Navy has. more admirals than ships.

And that there's a lot of it's a lot of it's just kind of an upgraded colonel in a sense as far as the administrative bloat goes. You know, that the managerial aspect of like a general now is something very different. Not all, again, not all of them. There are war fighters out there. But there are there are men like this men out there as well. Yeah. Well, I got to get going. Thank you.

And until the next time when I think we just may have to cover Mr. Forrestal. Absolutely. A true hero, unlike Mr. Bruch. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. Phylos is back for another profile of a, well, let's say this time the person will, might be a little more likable. How are you doing, Phyllis? I'm doing very well, Pete.

Thank you. All right. Who you got for us today? The man is named James Forrestall. You probably haven't heard of him. Most people haven't. He was this country's first secretary of defense. If you have heard of him, it's because he died under very suspicious circumstances.

But more importantly, the official narrative about him, which is a suicide, is often credited to his overwork and his extreme sense of duty. But I don't believe that to be the case. However, it's important not just to look at this man through the circumstances of his death going backwards. We want to look at his entire life to understand how his end happened and also to make sense of it. All right. Well, yeah, I think most people. may have heard a conspiracy podcast here or there talking about his demise and how it may have

been connected with a certain program. But I think there's a more likely scenario that played out there. So where do you want to go? Where do you want to go from here? So I want to start out from the jump and say that this man, unlike Bernard Baruch, who we discussed earlier, this man is a bona fide hero. What he did during World War I and World War II, I think whether it was a murder or a suicide,

I think this man gave his life for his country. And I think that we are just going to start right at the beginning. And by the time we get to May 22nd, 1949, you'll have a pretty good idea of who he is. So I'm going to start with a few of my sources that I used for this. The first is the Forrestall Diaries that were published in 1951 by his personal aide who worked for him during World War II. There's also a book called The Death of James Forrestall, which came out in the early 2000s, which alleges that he was murdered. And there's an additional book that came out.

It's called The Assassination of James Forrestall. And that one came out in the late 1950s, and it was put out by a publishing company called Western Isles, which was the publishing arm of the John Birch Society. So people had suspicions about the nature of his passing very early on shortly after his death. But I'm going to start with his life. So James Forrestall was born in 1892 to an Irish Catholic family. At the time, this was not the most powerful demographic in the United States. But regardless of his middle class life, he entered Dartmouth on his own merit in 1911, and he transferred in 1912 to Princeton.

He was voted most likely to succeed by a wide margin in his senior year at Princeton, and he was on the student council and was chairman of the Princetonian. and he left Princeton one credit short of graduation. It's never really explained in any of the sources why he decided to leave Princeton, and I'm not going to speculate, but he did not encounter failure after leaving Princeton. He took a job with the Tobacco Products Corporation selling cigarettes, and then in 1916, he entered the investment banking house of William A. Reed and company,

which later became Dylan Reed and Company, where he made his business career. And one thing that I'd like to stress from the outset here is that every endeavor that he sets his mind to, he achieves tremendous success. This is a very smart, motivated, and disciplined man. So in 1917, the United States is drawn into World War I and Forrestall, despite his intelligence and his Princeton credentials, even though he doesn't have a lot of war. degree, he chooses to enlist as a basic seaman in the U.S. Navy. He then transfers, due to his own merit to the aviation branch, which was in its infancy in World War I, recall from the episodes that Stormy put out that the first Yale unit and other American gentry were in the process of founding naval aviation at this time, and at the time

they were drawing the best and the brightest of their generation in this country to be a part of these units. So this was not something that a regular Joe Schmo could get into. Since there was not much infrastructure and training for naval aviation in the U.S. at the time, he was trained in Canada with the Royal Flying Corps, and he was passed as a ensign, I believe, naval aviator number 154 in the Navy, and he returned to the United States to receive his commission. Now, the Navy got wind of his, a conversean. here and his motivation and decided that due to his business credentials, he was best suited at the Office of Naval Operations in Washington, D.C. And so he worked at a desk job and made first lieutenant by the armistice at the end of World War I.

So this guy did not see any combat in World War I, but very, very smart. and this country took tremendous advantage of his talents. So after the war, he goes back to Dylan Reed and company and has a meteoric rise. He makes partner in 1923 and was a vice president just three years later by 1926. And then by 1938, at the age of 46, he becomes the president of Dylan Reading Company. And that's an incredible rise. throughout his life and business career, he was known for helping numerous young men through college without them knowing of his financial assistance for them. And he gave away a tremendous amount of his wealth during his lifetime, but he never made this information public or capitalized on it in any way, either politically or in the media.

So very hardworking makes it to the top of this company. and he could have just stayed on Wall Street for the rest of his life. He'd done his service in World War I. There was really not a bigger obligation that was necessitated of him. There was no external pressure on him. But the more that I read about the man, the clear it became that he had a very strong moral compass, and he had a great deal of honor. In June 1940, FDR personally extended him an inviory.

invitation to join the administration. Because in 1940 of May, FDR called for the rearmament and war production to resume at a tremendously accelerated pace. Sorry, I'm using tremendously too much. This required a big cooperation of large industrial and financial interests. So Forrestall was named one of the secret six special administrative assistance to FDR that were expected to have complete loyalty. And in his diaries, he describes it as a passion for anonymity. On August of 1940, he was named the first Undersecretary of the Navy. So to clarify this, similar to Bernard Baruch, the interplay here between the industrial

activity during wartime and also the nature of the military warrants an explanation here. So as this role, he is the connecting point between the military demand and the civilian production for the Navy. By 1945, the Navy had added 1,200 major combatant ships, including 99 aircraft carriers. Between 1941 and 1945, we doubled the number of submarines, cruisers, and destroyers. In total, the size of the Navy increased six times its pre-war numbers. So he's managing this enormous administrative task by managing production, inventory. He's cutting through the red tape of existing Navy bureaucracies, and he's expanding the shipbuilding industry. And if that was all he had done, that would have been great.

But he doesn't stop there. He's not a desk jockey for this time around in World War II. And this is what I think sets him apart as a hero. In 1941, he flies personally to London to deal with the British about the lend-lease system. In 1942, after the Battle of Guadalcanal, he went to the South Pacific. In 1944, the active secretary of the Navy dies, and so he has promoted upward to be the Secretary of the Navy. A very powerful position. at this time and in this capacity in 1944,

he goes to the Kowajalina Atoll to observe the Pacific offensive. And this, I think, is the most spectacular part. On February 23rd, 1945, he goes to the active Battle of Iwo Jima, and he lands during the amphibious assault operation with the Marines to expect the Japanese pillboxes and fortifications. He doesn't land with the first wave. He lands about five or six hours after the initial landing. But if you know about the Battle of Iwo Jima, it was the bloodiest in Marine Corps history.

And he went up the beach with them, watching them throw grenades into these pillboxes and inspect the fortifications and the damage to understand their needs. And he watches the Marines raise the flag at Mount Suribachi. in that famous photograph that you see of the Marine Corps of the flag being hoisted, that's actually the second flag, which is photographed. The first flag that was raised was given to Mr. Forrestall by the Marines there. So I just want to help that paint a picture of the kind of man that he was and the way that he worked for this country purely selflessly

to both procure resources and also to understand the warfare in which he's, fighting. To compare it to the earlier episode with Mr. Baruch, I mean, Baruch goes after all the fighting's done, right? He goes after the war is basically over. And he walks around with the general staff and then gets back on a plane and goes home. But Mr. Forrestall takes a different route. And he's there with the Marines that are enlisted on the ground as a veteran himself. And so I think that's a very powerful thing. And to make it analogous to modern times, I can't. imagine our current Secretary of Defense doing something like this. So do we even know who that is?

I don't know. I mean, for two months, I don't think he knew who he was. Yeah. Apparently, it's such an important position now that you can disappear for, you know, a couple months at a time. And, you know, I mean, like a, like a congresswoman did recently, where they found her in an in an Alzheimer's facility where she had been for six months or something like that. We got a good system going here.

We should definitely do everything we can to preserve it. I'm sure that she was actively voting and commenting on all the issues and that it wasn't her staff running the voting tallies or committees or anything important like that. I'm sure. I'm sure this is all fine. It makes, I hate to get emotional, but when you compare the Cali, of man that, you know, walked the beach on Iwo Jima to our current bureaucrats.

I mean, it's it's endlessly frustrating to see something like this. And when you kind of watch Forrestall's downfall, it really starts to explain how we went from one type of man to the other. Well, yeah, I mean, you're, you know, if you're, if you're raising a flag and then you'd take it down and you're, you know, you would expect it to. go to commanding officer or something like that. But now who went to somebody, went to, you know, generally what would be considered a politician. Yeah.

That says something about probably the regard that command held him in. Exactly. And there was no, I mean, even at the time, there was not an expectation that that's something that he would do. But, you know, the man never shirked duty throughout his entire. life. I want to pivot now. And that's kind of a general biography. You can get all this stuff on Wikipedia. That's not the remarkable part. The information that I'm going to relay is mostly political and refers to kind of the state of international relations, the power players politically.

And all of this material, the source that I'm using is his diary. And a lot of this will kind of sync up very nicely with the material you've previously talked about with World War II and Thomas and the Marshall Plan, the Morgenthau plan. There's a lot that kind of becomes clear here. On August 25th of 1944, right, at this point, Forrestall's back in the United States, Henry Morgenthau, who was the Secretary of the Treasury, he walked in with FDR to a cabinet meeting. And he said that he was, very unhappy with an army report stating how to allocate food to the Germans after the conclusion of the war. Secretary Morgenthau stated that the Germans should have a subsistence level of food. As he put it, soup kitchens would be ample to sustain life, that otherwise they should be stripped clean. Secretary Forrestall objected to this because Secretary Morgenthau received this report from one Colonel Bernstein without going through proper army channels.

Secretary of State Cordell Hull did not go to the Quebec conference and he was frustrated that Morgenthau did as Secretary of Treasury, especially with the Morgenthau plan. Hull was reportedly so angry with this plan that he threatened to resign when Morgenthau's plan was chosen by FDR. Secretary of War, John Maw.

McCloy stated that the Morgenthau plan called for the, quote, conscious destruction of the economy in Germany and the encouragement of a state of impoverishment and disorder. So, I mean, Forrestall was very frustrated with this, and you're beginning to see a split in the cabinet of how things are going to go after the war and how Germany is going to be treated. I have no doubt that Forrestall viewed Germany and Japan as adversaries, like most other men of his generation,

but there is a humanity about this. I don't think that he wanted Germany destitute. He realized that it was a big problem because, as I'll get into, he is beginning to really perceive the Soviet Union as a threat. And I can prove this because on September 2nd, 1944, Forrestall wrote a letter to his friend Palmer Hoyt, quote, I find that whenever any American suggest we act in accordance with the needs of our own security,

he is apt to be called a goddamned fascist or imperialist, while if Uncle Joe, referring to Joseph Stalin, suggests that he needs all the Baltic provinces, half of Poland, all of Bessarabia, and access to the Mediterranean, all hands agree that he is a fine, frank, candid, and generally delightful fellow who is very easy to deal with because he's so explicit in what he wants. And then... This sounds familiar. This sounds familiar in the modern day. Where if you're America first,

America first is fine. As long as it's not really America first, it's America and our greatest ally. And if you say anything bad about our greatest ally, then you start hearing how great, how great they are. We couldn't survive without them. One thing that becomes very clear to me as I was doing research for both Forrestall's life and Baruch's life is that throughout the Roosevelt and Truman administrations,

there was a very specific program coming from the executive, and if you weren't with it, you were destroyed. That was very clear. And more evidence of this split. between Forrestall and other members of the cabinet occurs on November 23rd, 1944. Forrestall talked with Harry Hopkins. If you've been listening to the Pete Quinoa show, you know who Harry Hopkins is. He oversaw the Lent lease arrangement.

Forrestall said that the United States should have a civilian side joint chiefs of staff because at the time, the British were resisting the American position during Adolf Burrell, the Assistant Secretary of State, his trip to the air conference for British rights. While simultaneously, the United States was having Morgenthau give the British billions of dollars in lend to lease. So to make that more concise, Forrestall was extremely concerned that at the conclusion of the war,

as they're starting to divvy up the structure of power and money, after the war, that the United States is giving Britain, tons and tons of money while not acquiescing to the U.S. position on certain airspace rights. And this is very important because, you know, there has to be kind of a quid pro quo that occurs here in diplomacy. And it's not, you can't just take the U.S.'s money and screw it. But again, if you're listening to this, this is a pattern that occurs again and again. March 4th, 1944, he writes in his diary, specifications for a presidential candidate. This is a little bit lighter, so a little levity here.

His first specification was looks, the second was height, the third was legal or political background, the fourth was desire for the job, and the fifth was political experience. So these are ranked ordered. On March 13th, 1944, He goes to the Yalta conference. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, this is his direct quote,

seems to be going through some sort of a menopause. He talks with great eloquence in meetings, but did not follow up in subsequent sessions where substantive matters were dealt with the same bigger. Continuing on, in April of 1945, FDR dies, and Forrestall writes something down very curious in his diary. when Mr. Truman, President Truman is sworn in, his only active omission was a failure to raise his right hand when he was repeating the oath with his left hand on the Bible. The chief justice had to indicate to him that he should raise his hand.

Under the circumstances, it gave dignity and firmness. So there's a lot going on in his diaries where you have to read in between the lines. and the more that I learned about Mr. Truman, the more I have an increasing disdain for him. He cleaned out Roosevelt's cabinet, even very qualified man. And after his reelection, he brought in a lot of his Missouri friends and eventually forced out Forestall. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. On May 1st, 1945, he writes in his diary, How far and how thoroughly do we want to beat Japan?

In other words, do we want to morganthal those islands? Do we want to destroy the whole industrial potential? And there's a few other times where he uses Morgenthau as a verb to mean, render a country economically wasted. I want to get a little bit into the communist stuff because at this time is starting to become more and more important in his diaries. On May 28, 1945, Forrestall contacts J. Edgar Hoover to go after one Lieutenant Andrew Roth, who was furnishing 1,700 classified documents to the communist newspaper Amaragia, and he was also a member of the

Communist Party. He advocated for his arrest. Additionally, something else that he did was order an inquiry into incompetence among the general staff. during the December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. And he felt that the general staff after the investigation was concluded and a verdict was rendered were actually let off too easy. You have to consider his position as Secretary of the Navy that, you know, regardless of it being a surprise attack, a significant amount of U.S. forward stationed ships in the Pacific were destroyed at this time. And so Forrestall believed there should have been more accountability for this at the staff level. So very anti-communist, very competent man.

In July of 1945, although not officially a part of the Potsdam Declaration, he flew privately to Germany with a young future president John F. Kennedy, who is the son of Joseph P. Kennedy, the former ambassador to Great Britain. The war wraps up. Truman is president. This is where I'm going to start to veer out of the diaries a little bit because the John Birch society stuff about Forrestall and also other inquiries into his life begin to bring more attention to Forrestal's anti-communist activities. So in December of 1946, Senator Joseph McCarthy first came to Washington.

And according to sources in his book McCarthyism, The Fight for America in 1952, Navy Secretary Forrestall personally opened McCarthy's eyes to the mass infiltration of communists into our government, but also named names. Let's see here. When asked directly by an anonymous Birch society guy who was talking with McCarthy in the early 50s,

Senator McCarthy replied, the answer to both questions is yes. Forrestall told me he was convinced that General Marshall was one of the key figures in the United States in advancing communist objectives. And as a international relations side note, James Forrestall was also the sponsor of George Kennan's Long Telegram and Mr. X article. If you know anything about international relations and kind of the history of the early Cold War, these were the gold standard in setting the U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union and represented a significant shift in the country becoming more anti-communist after World War II. So I didn't know that James Forrestall was behind the sponsorship of Kennan's work. But the more I dig into it, the more I can confirm of it. I want to talk now. I want to shift a little bit to Israel because this is what did him in in as much as I can say.

Let's see. Do you have any questions up until this point? I know I've been going a while. No, no. This is where it starts to get interested. All right. From his diary, December 1st, 1947. I remarked that many thoughtful people of the Jewish faith had deep misgivings about the wisdom of the Zionists' pressures for a Jewish state in Palestine. I also remarked that the New York Times editorial of Saturday morning point up those misgivings when it said, many of us have long had doubts concerning the wisdom of erecting a political state on the basis of religious. I said, I thought the decision was fraught with great danger for the future security of this country, meaning the United States.

December 3rd, 1947. So now, just as a date as a chronology reference point, Israel, the state was established on May 14th, 1948. So we're leading into the run-up for how that decision transpired. December 3rd, 1947, two administrative assistance to the president were chiefly responsible for the decision, the decision being whether to recognize the state of Israel upon its creation. Both had told President Truman that Dewe was about to come out with a statement favoring the Zionist position on Palestine, and that they had insisted that unless the president anticipate this movement, New York State would be lost. to the Democrats. I asked James Burns, the former Truman of Secretary of State, who had resigned

in January 1947, what he thought of the possibility of getting Republican leaders to agree with the Democrats to have the Palestine question placed on a non-political basis. He wasn't particularly optimistic about the success of this effort because of the fact that Rabbi Silver was one of Taft's closest associates, the senator. Senator Tafts. followed Silver on the Palestine Haifa question. I said I thought it was a most disastrous and regrettable fact that the foreign policy of this country was determined by the contributions a particular block of special interests might make to the party funds.

So we're starting to see how much the Zionist lobbying effort to politicians was beginning to pay off on both the Republican and the Democratic side. Now, I should add that Forrestall's interests were anti-communist, and I couldn't find anything in his diaries, all 1,500 pages of it that were anti-Semitic in any way. There was never anything negative he ever said about Jews, despite whatever BS was contrived about him after his life. His interest was geopolitical. Here's a demonstration of this. January 6th, 1948. He ate breakfast with Mr. B. Brewster Jennings, President of Sokony Vacuum of New York. This company later became mobile oil company and was known today as ExxonMobil. Mr. Jennings noted that multiple oil companies had stopped oil production in Saudi Arabia because of the disturbed condition in Palestine and the indications of its continuance. I express it as my opinion that unless we had access to Middle East oil, American motorcar companies would have to design a four-cylinder motor car

sometime within the next five years. That's a significant downgrade. Most car engines in the United States, if not all, at the time, were V8s with some V-6s. V-4, like four-cylinder engines were really not used except in like motorcycles, boats, farm machinery. This is not something that was used in cars at the time. So he was very concerned that, like, four-cylinder engines. like the skyrocketing oil prices and the problems here would cause significant geopolitical risk to the United States. A month goes by February 3rd, 1948. He meets with FDR Jr., who came in with a strong advocacy of the Jewish state in Palestine. FDR Jr. says to Secretary Forrestall that we should support the United Nations decision

and in general, a broad across-the-board statement of the Zionist position. I thought it was about time that somebody should pay some consideration to whether we might not lose the United States. The same day in 1948, he goes to have lunch with Bernard Baruch, who, if you haven't heard it yet, I recommend you check out the earlier episode about him. Baruch took the line of advising me not to be active in this particular matter, then it was already identified to agree that it was not in my own interests, with opposition to the United Nations policy on Palestine. Baruch said he himself did not approve of the Zionist's actions,

but in the next breath said the Democratic Party could only lose by trying to get our government's policy reversed, and said it was the most inequitable thing to let the British arm the Arabs, and for us not to furnish similar equipment to the Jews. Then, later this afternoon, okay, the Israel thing is very much on his mind, he goes to meet with Winthrop Aldrich, the chairman of Chase National Bank. Mr. Aldrich said that he was very sympathetic to Forrestall. However, it would be best for him to leave the decision to Secretary of State,

George Marshall, and John Foster Dulles. On May 14, 1948, the United States recognizes Israel. At this point in the diaries, Mr. Forrestall's assistant, notes that the President and White House staff had taken Palestine out of the hands of the State Department just as they had taken the military budget out of the hands of the Defense Department. At the National Security Council meeting that day, this is now a later point, he doesn't let the Israel thing go once the country is created. He's very concerned about it.

At the National Security Council meeting on October 21, 1948, Forrestall spoke with apparent asperity of another disconnection in our policy meeting. Mr. Forrestall referred to the State Department request for 4,000 to 6,000 troops to be used as guard forces in Jerusalem in implementation of the Bernadot Plan for Palestine. Mr. Forstall said that actually our Palestine policy had been made for squalid political purposes. He hoped that someday he would be able to make his position on this issue clear. And at this point, I want to bring up some. something. When Mr. Forrestall was checked in for mental health reasons into a clinic, and eventually the events occurred that led to his death, he ordered his assessment to retain

copy of 15 handwritten diaries at the White House in storage because he wanted to keep them safe upon his release after treatment. So I want to just say that statement again. He hoped that someday he would be able to make his position on this issue clear. And let's see here. At this point, he's so anti-Zionist that he's starting to get negative press attention. A lot of it from a fellow called Drew Pearson and primarily a gossip colonist named Walter Winschell. And their objective seemed to really go beyond getting him out of the government. They really wanted to destroy his reputation.

Forrestall was thinking about making plans to leave because Truman was re-elected in November in 1948, and Truman got rid of most of the FDR carryovers, and Forrestall was not getting along well with the Missouri cronies that Truman had put in his cabinet and in high political offices. Forrestall met with President Truman, and he agreed that he would leave the government on May 1st of 1949. But unbeknownst to Forrestall on March 4th, 1949, Truman made the abrupt announcement that Forrestall was going to be replaced by a West Virginia lawyer named Louis Johnson, the man who had been Truman's main fundraiser during the campaign, and also a person for whom Forrestall had very little respect.

There was also additional opposition from a guy named David Niles within the cabinet. He was another one of the few people that was carried over from Roosevelt to Truman, and he disliked Forrestall intensely. One thing that's interesting about Niles as a cabinet-level official was that, according to Venona papers, he worked with the NKVD to smuggle people from Mexico to the United States. And he also worked with Harry Hopkins. And he was also the longest serving White House aid. Very interesting, right? The forces that are starting to move against Forrestall. And this is all documented. And so I want to, I was in a mention Pearson, the, Drew Pearson,

not the wide, the old wide receiver, but the American columnist, Quaker, Walter Winchell, Russian Jewish immigrant parents. Yep, all of them. All of them. I was astonished when I was reading this in the account. And I want to, and now we're going to get to like a very, this is going to be dark. And to make it YouTube friendly, just stop me if I say anything that I shouldn't

for whatever terms. I don't care about YouTube anymore. They do monetize me. They can go fuck themselves. Fair enough. All right. So we now get to a very pivotal question. And this is the reason that people know of Secretary Forrestall.

I think it is a tragedy that he is known for how he died. And the life that he lived and the work that he put in for this country, I want to just advance the mainstream theory of how he died. And then I'll go into what I think is the true. reason that he died. Because I want to differentiate between possibility and probability. It is possible that he kills himself in 1949. The man was...

Sorry, I have to think about how I do this. 1949 comes around. He's been pushed out of government. And he had tirelessly worked for five years straight, regularly working 15-hour days, and in this entire time frame, he takes one three-day vacation. So it is possible that he worked himself into a state of total exhaustion and depressant, and that all of the people around him, all these new cabinet people, are destroying his reputation, and they are harassing him.

they're writing negative press about him, and all of his effort was being shit on by people who really should have appreciated what he had done for this country. And this was not a easy task to be named as the first Secretary of Defense to walk us through as a country the first years of the Cold War. And I doubt anyone else put in his position would do anywhere near as good a job as he would. But I think that no matter how you look at it, even if his death was a suicide, it is an abject tragedy and a stain on this country for a hero to die in this way. But I don't think that it was a suicide. And I'm going to go into the evidence for why that is. So he voluntarily checks himself into mental health treatment. And I don't,

I've never been to a psych ward, but you, when you're in a mental health hospital, I guess, in the late 40s, people have visitation rights. Some people can visit you. Some people can't. The determination of how that's made is done at the hospital, and they can turn away people for whatever reason and admit people as they see fit. Now, you would think that if you're in a mental health hospital, you know, if you're in a psych ward, whatever you want to call it, for treatment, you want people to visit you that help you and care about you and will bolster you up. And that people that you don't like are people that aggravate you stay the fuck away. And the opposite happened. And this is where it gets fascinating. So who was denied visitation to see Mr. Forrestall when he's receiving treatment? Well, two Catholic priests were denied seeing him.

And do you know who wasn't denied visitation? His Secretary of Defense successor, who he hated Louis Johnson, his aide, Forrestal's aide, who compiled his diaries, had described him as an overly ambitious troublemaker. Forrestall had told the aide that Johnson was incompetent and felt degraded at the very idea of being replaced by such a man. Other visitors, who he was not on good terms with, include President Truman himself and one congressman, Lyndon Bain Johnson. LBJ was known in 1949, even at this time, as being very pro-Zionist. Right? So all of these Zionist people are meeting with Forrestall after having pushed the man out.

By the way, LBJ was also close with Drew Pearson. Yep. But don't take my word for it. On May 23rd, 1949, the Washington Post wrote an article headlined after he died because they are scum, excuse me. delusions of persecution, acute anxiety, and depression marked Forrestal's illness. Quote from the article, his fear of reprisals from pro-Zionists was said to stem from attacks by some columnists on what they said was his opposition to partition of Palestine under a UN mandate. In his last year's defense secretary, he received great numbers of abusive and threatening letters.

And I'm going to go into the details here, and I will leave you to make up your mind, whether it's a murder or a suicide. At 150 a.m. on Sunday, May 22, 1949, James Forrestall died at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. At the time, Forrestall was under more liberty of movement and less supervision. In the last, sorry, I already said that. James's brother, Henry Forrestall, states that either the communists or the Jews did him in. And I want to go through some material facts about the night of his murder or suicide. And I want to add that there are multiple books that have been written on this, and that if you look them up, you will see very convincing evidence. The guard that was, you know, a guard was on duty to watch him, check in on him every 15 minutes.

The guard was new, only having been on duty for a few months, replacing the usual guard who was supposedly AWOL on a drunken bender. There was a central witness in the case who was named in the book, but I'm leaving him anonymous. His daughter sent the author of the book on the assassination of James Forrestall. This email in 2017, I started reading your article on the Forrestal death. I got to the part about X's story being irrelevant. He was my father and I can tell you he lived in fear. of something happening because of information he knew about the case. Even up to a year prior to my father's death, he had called me and was in fear that he was

going to be questioned again about the issue. It might have been irrelevant to you, but it was not irrelevant to my family. It was always a shadow in our lives. So he dies on May 22, 1949. I believe there's sort of a cover up here. What makes me suggest that? Well, you see, the day before, James is. brother Henry calls the hospital to arrange picking up James Forrestall.

You see, he's recovered by this point, and he's getting released the next day. And he dies on the same day that his brother has a train ticket booked to come and pick him up from the hospital. It's probably not something you're going to find in the Wikipedia article. I'm sorry, just it's tremendously, it's upsetting. You know, they denied the man priests to come and visit him and made him, forced him to meet with people that he didn't like when he was in a tremendously weakened state. Yeah, the denial of, the denial of clergy is, I mean, that's just straight up evil. Yeah. Dr. Raines, the attending physician, stated that Mr. Forrestall had never made a suicidal gesture or a suicidal attempt.

Um, Forrestall was confirmed to sleep at 1.30 a.m. by the attending guard, and when the guard checked again, was also asleep at 145 a.m. So we mean to understand the nature of his suicide that he wakes up between 145 and 150, goes outside of his room, goes downstairs, ties his bathrobe code, cord around his neck. and this is unbelievable. The manner in which they describe him dying,

he tries to hang himself by his bathroom cord around his neck, tied to the radiator, while jumping out of a 16th story window. Now, I want to pose something to you, which is I think you would either hang yourself or you would jump out of the 16th story window. It doesn't make a lot of sense that you would try to do both and that you would be able to do it within five minutes of waking up confirmed by the witness statement

and that, you know, the day of your release from the hospital. These are very strange details that do not add up. And I can't say it with certainty because we're never going to know for certain. But one other fact that I'll add here, at the height of the Palestine, controversy. His limo was followed to and from his office by a blue sedan containing two men. When the police were notified and the sedan apprehended, it was discovered that the two men were photographers employed by a Zionist organization. They explained to the police that they had hoped to obtain photographs of the limousine's occupant, entering or leaving an Arab embassy, in order

to demonstrate that the official involved was in close contact with Arab representatives. There's one other piece of evidence that I want to go over here. I'm not sure if this is something you can share or not. The handwriting samples. I can describe. I have those. I'll download them real quick from where you sends them to me and I'll share them. Yeah, for sure. But for the audience that could be listening to this, there are two handwriting samples that are confirmed of his. One is from a Western Union telegram, which represents a short script or something that you do over a very brief period of time. And the second is a handwritten letter to President Truman on a secretary of the Navy letterhead signed by him. These are two documents which are confirmed with his

signature. And then the other thing that is included below is a poem transcription purportedly found in his vacated room. Now, I'm not an expert on handwriting. but I would argue logically that if you look with even an untrained eye between the telegram and the letter and the purported suicide note that it is not the same person writing this for those listening the script the capital letters are different that's okay so what you're seeing now that is his that is his handwriting on the navy letterhead it's straight the letters are neat the font is consistent And if you change it to perhaps the note or the other one.

Change it to the other one real quick. Okay, this is like a short form telegram. Okay, this is something he's writing really quickly. So you can see it, it's the same person writing it signed by him, confirmed by him. And now change it to the suicide note. Now look at that and tell me that that's the same person, right? can see that the font is tilted to the right and that the capital letters don't match. And that I, and as I said earlier, when you look at his actual confirmed handwriting,

it's sloppier than this. It's, well, it's, it's much different than this. This seems more compact. This seems more, it's just different handwriting. And also, you would think it at a time. when you're writing your suicide note, you may not have the best penmanship. And this is like pristine. Yeah. And this, you know, so the handwriting, I mean, this is what suffices as a suicide note. I mean, I find it unbelievable that a man who left 15 handwritten diaries at the White

House for safekeeping upon his reliefs, all he would ever leave as a suicide note would be one transcribed poem from a book he's reading, you know, when was it written? You know, was it written at night in the five minutes before he jumps out the window? Was it left there? You know, why would a man who had planned so far ahead on being released? You know, this is what he, this is his goodbye, you know, a man who was our Secretary of Defense for five years and Secretary of the Navy. Um, that's his explanation. You know, it's none of it adds up. The details are very, very strange.

And, um, let's see. What other points here are there to draw? Um, let's see. Okay, we covered his, we covered his passing. Um, to do, to do, big stuff. The Wikipedia article, most everything you read in it is BS. I would recommend looking at the sources, the death of James Forrestall and the assassination of James Forrestall. These are two different books. It's hundreds and hundreds of pages of evidence because these are sourced from the FOIA requests that went to the U.S. government. And the actual witness testimony, the inquiry, all of the actual evidence is sourced within it. So nothing that I'm saying. saying is conjecture. This is all

demonstrated in the paperwork that comes out from the federal government. And another thing I'd like to add is that right at the top of the Wikipedia article it says that he was administered barbiturates and that the subtext there is that

this perhaps altered his mental state to make him suicidal or that he was under some kind of heavy influence of drugs. That is not the case, it is confirmed that when he went to bed the night before his suicide, he did not take any, um, any barbiturates. He was, he refused them. The aid, the medical aide who was working there, uh, offered them to him and he declined and he said he can sleep without him. And, uh, you know, so most stuff that you're going to encounter in the Wikipedia article about him is,

uh, is not true. Well, that's quite a lot. Then that's, that's, some hearing stories like this, you know, I immediately, I start looking at big picture stuff, and it's like, okay, so he was, he was one of, I forget who the other person was, who told Truman do not recognize the state of Israel, do not recognize. And I forget who the other one was, but they relented, and he stuck. And, you know, something I said earlier, you know, our greatest ally, does anybody want to ask the question of whether things, the United States, the culture, the country, the government has gotten better or worse since 1948? I mean, I've heard politicians say since October 7th of 2023 that the United States can't exist with. the state of Israel.

I'm, I don't, first of all, what kind of, what world are you living in if you're saying that it's pure propaganda, do you even believe it? Do you, do you believe it or are you just, is it something you, or just blatantly lying and you know you're lying? Is it something you're lying. This is something you've convinced yourself of? And honestly, if people, if American heroes, and many American heroes have suffered even death because this state exists and it has so much power and basically occupies ours. how do people not see this how do people continue to how do people continue to defend it and i guess the only yeah i mean and i'm talking about even kind of people who who have the power or the resources to do it

do they know and they just they're scared that they're going to end up in a mental institution in a hospital somewhere and they're going to take their own life, quote unquote. Yeah, and if you, I mean, there's a few interesting aspects of this that stand out to me. The biggest aspect is I think this is the first one. I mean, in what we consider, how do I even put this? Preventable deaths. I mean, yes, the man, oh, gosh, how do I even go about this? He was opposed to the creation of Israel, but he was out of the picture.

He was no longer the Secretary of Defense. He had resigned from the cabinet. He wanted to just, he was talking to his brother about this, that he just wanted to go, go home, and he wanted to work for a local newspaper. And they're, you know, after five years in this incredibly high-stressed position, you know, this is not someone. who would want to advance a political agenda. He was on, his political fortunes were toast as early as 1946. And I think the real tragedy is that his fate was sealed. More so than, okay, let's get this guy out of the picture.

And, you know, then we'll achieve some kind of. of goal that we can't enact with this person in power. That's not what happened. This was, I don't even know what to call it, because it's not revenge because he was a minority position on the cabinet, which was pro-Zionist. And it wasn't political because Democrats and Republicans had unified whether Truman or Dewey to agree on this issue. There, there was no reason for this man to die.

from like a realpolitik completely evil, pragmatic, or rational line of thinking. There was no, there was no reason. And if it wasn't murder, then this man committing suicide is still an immense tragedy. I guess that doesn't, I'm just kind of, I'm rambling a little bit here. But, Well, I mean, if he committed, even if he did commit suicide, he did it for a reason. He did it because he was driven to it. Absolutely. Yeah, and why? Why, when you're already basically out of the spotlight?

I mean, it's just revenge. I mean, it's just, I don't even know if it's revenge. I think it's just, it's just, we can do it. Is it is we have the power to do it and fuck you. Yeah, and they did have the power to do it. Looking at the Vernona papers and all the people in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations who worked with the communists, you know, in this country, it was framed that the communists had no power and the evil McCarthyites came in and persecuted people. but the actual history is the polar inverse of that fact. You know, a man who, I mean, this man, again, there's nothing anti-Semitic.

He had no animosity here. He was simply looking out for the interests, the security and the energy interests of the United States. And it wasn't enough that he was humiliated by being. made to resign early than he would have liked after giving everything for his country. When he was in mental health treatment, people that he hated were showing up and they probably weren't remorseful about their actions and having driven him to that point. And they probably weren't, you know, there to make nice. And it is an evil action to refuse.

use somebody, their priests, and to put them in a room with their enemy when they're in a psych ward. I mean, you know, and, you know, what is the value of one good man? You know, this starting, he had, he had every opportunity throughout his, I just want to like recap his life real quick. He had every opportunity to say no. He didn't have to, um, he didn't have to leave the business world to join the Navy. And even in the Navy, he didn't have to take the risk of joining the aviation branch, which was a dangerous

job to fly planes in 1917. He didn't have to give up that pilots commission to go work as a bureaucrat in D.C. or go back to business life. He could have refused FDR in 1940

to assist this country in its rearmament and war production. He also could have turned down after the heart attack, his promotion to be Secretary of Navy, and he could have turned down the post-war change from Secretary of Navy to Secretary of Defense. At any point, he could have just said, no, he could have just taken the money and the power and the influence and just gone home. But throughout his life, he gave money to poor men who could not afford college, and he argued in favor of an enemy that was defeated in warfare for the humanitarian aid.

And he was anti-communist because he loved this country. And he, at every turn, especially in the Truman years, he was needlessly persecuted. and his opinions were ignored and his efforts to tell the truth were suppressed and it's a it kind of defies belief and

the man was not a nameless bureaucrat although even if he was a humble and simple man it would be still equally a tragedy the man was our secretary of defense the first one, a man who was asked to pioneer a political position and do a job competently, a man who never took vacations, and a man who really gave every part of himself for this country. To see, you know, this being his legacy, and for years afterwards, he was, you know, derided as, I don't even know. I don't even know.

I couldn't bring myself to read through most of, there are a lot of sources out there from the time that were kind of forgotten about that would portray him in a very negative light when he was Secretary of Defense, that after his death were kind of, you know, you can't really find the microfilms anymore for research and the other stuff. And, you know, he left 2,800 pages of his diaries at the White House so that people would know. And even though the addition that we got was heavily edited,

it shows a man who just every single day went to work for this country. And I think it's, ah, man, it's, what a tragedy. What a tragedy for this man to be treated in this way. And when you compare it to a man like Baruch, who made it past his 80th birthday on 17,000, anchors and profited millions and millions of dollars from this country's wartime efforts and Forrestall dies alone and you know the day he was supposed to be released

from the hospital I just it yeah I don't know much else to say and I wish there's a I mean I do want to there has to be some kind of positive because what a negative note to end on or to like wrap things or to steadily wrap things up on. I think I think the positive to be drawn from this is that the Trump administration needs to make an effort to find these men who will give everything and to make sure that their efforts are used as productively and efficiently as this country used the talent of James Forrestall. And when it comes down to it, when these men that are going to step up and fill these positions and do this job at like tremendous reputational risk to themselves and their families, the administration needs to go to the mat for them in a way that I found very few people went to the mat for Mr. Forrestall. And that I think is the central lesson and why I got interested in him.

I first heard about him. Stormy mentioned that Forrestall was a hero and that got me very intrigued. And I think that there are going to be heroes in this country. There have been in the interim period between World War II and now. And then in the Trump administration, there's going to be heroes. and when they do difficult things, there has to be people that support them because there's going to be the same types of people out there

that destroyed Forrestall's reputation that undermined him and that whether either by suicide or murder eventually drove him to suicide. There has to be people out there that will say no to Muckrager's and to support people in the Trump administration. Because it is an equally difficult task that we face ahead of us now

to rearm and to industrialize and to onshore manufacturing. And we're going to need people as talented as forestall to do it. The man, to reiterate, grew the Navy six times over in four years. Okay, built 100 aircraft carriers and arranged for that. you know, could the U.S. build one aircraft carrier today in four years? You know, it's not very clear. Yeah. Not the way things are structured nowadays.

It's just, but there's too much, you know, you have to have this amount of diversity here and there and everything. And there are men out there. there are Americans out there who can do these things and do them well they're either being you know attacked fed prescription drugs

liberally even if they don't need them or they're just being replaced by you know Frankenstein head shaped street shitters from India yeah now we could use with a few more Irish Catholics in this administration. Yeah.

All right. Let's wrap this up here because it just, it gets depressing. The more you think about it, but yeah, you have to, these men, men like him are out there. They just, you would think they'd be smart enough to be like, I don't want anything to do with that government. or if I haven't have anything to do with that government, I'm going to use it as a way to enrich myself because they're fucking dangerous. And, you know, if I had some way to have government contracts

so that I can enrich myself and, you know, basically make myself bulletproof through that kind of wealth, I would. And maybe some of those men have been doing that for about 30 or 40 years. And, you know, the smartest men out there just don't. really want anything to do with it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. All right. What? You get anything? No, nothing for me. All right. Well, I'll link to your YouTube channel again that hopefully one of these days you'll get back to reading forgotten books on. Yes, sir. And yeah, thank you. and we'll talk about something.

I want to maybe talk about doing one more of these, but I want to think of the person to do it on something that can follow through on this thread that you started to pull here. Absolutely. All right. Thanks, Philos. Appreciate it. Thank you, Pete.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. Philos is back and another portrait of a 20th century figure in American history. Are you doing, Phyllis? I'm doing very well. It is my great displeasure to bring you this person we're dealing with tonight. Like many others, I've been kind of hoodwinked by the propaganda. And everything, even down to the words that we use and the thoughts that we have, have in our modern dialogue and conversation, it all originates from this guy. There's many,

many examples that we'll be going through, but I didn't really realize how insidious this Edward Bernays guy was. It's really something. Well, let me just start off with this question. I mean, you're, you would just have to call him amoral, right? Yeah. Yeah. Throughout, throughout is, I don't want to call it quite a career because it's really more of a force of nature. He, there's never an ought in all of his books and all of his interviews, and the man lived to be about 100. It was only right around his 100th birthday that he had everything, anything even approaching a conscience. And I wouldn't even go that far as to call it like a conscience. I think it was sort of this deep realization that he had really screwed up the state of the world and the way that people interact.

But I think it was even beyond him to comprehend. No moral fiber, no moral backbone responsible for a tremendous amount of evil. That's how I would characterize him, yeah, completely. Yeah, once you start reading him and you start getting into him, and there's a lot to learn. You can learn from him. Most of it is going to be of the negative, the negative sorts, basically how to manipulate.

But probably what's more important then is that you learn how you're being manipulated and so that you can approach it and, you know, not fall for it. It was funny because as I'm wont to do, I was talking to my wife last night, and I was telling her just how crazy all this stuff was, all these different examples. And she told me something pretty obvious, which is that, well, on the one hand, the American people were kind of primed and ready to be manipulated and that they don't want to think really deeply about things. And she kind of posed me this question in this country, how could it have been any different? and I'm inclined to agree with her, although I think if a man like Brunais had never lived, the entire course of the 20th century would have been changed.

Yeah, yeah. So why don't you get into it and we'll decide whether it was for the better. I think we all know it wasn't, but maybe there are some people out there who will think that he did a good. I don't know. So we'll start with a few little callouts. Pete previously put out an episode on Mr. Bernays, episode 835 with Buck Johnson back in December of 22. And it covered specifically one of his lesser-known books called The Engineering of Consent.

And that title should already raise some eyebrows. Really liked all your different callouts of the different, different figures. and companies within that document. And I had a lot of thoughts on it, but we'll circle around back to that. The way that most people encounter Bernays, if you're my age, or around then, I'm about 30. They encounter him through Adam Curtis's The Century of the Self. And that is a four-part documentary, which covers the theories of Sigmund Freud and how developed consumerism and political control throughout the 20s.

century. And it's worth a watch just for a form of entertainment. Academic agents covered it. But the central referential ideas, the presuppositions before I talk about Mr. Bernays are the following. The first thing to keep in mind is that Bernays lived from 1891 until 1995. He was lucid until the end of his life, and he always had both a vested interest and an active career in what he was doing. So the entirety of the 20th century happened for the most part under his methods, let's say. There's some key background information that you need to be aware of before understanding the life of Mr. Bernays. The first is that the global population tripled in the 19th century, and that means a tripling of the goods that are produced in the world and the amount

that are consumed in the world. Prior to Bernay's living, advertising as an American industry is widely popular. Americans in the 19th century were far and away the most literate population, and they'd also previously encountered people trying to lie to them in the form of yellow journalism. They'd been swayed in literature, in broadsheets, in newspapers, and periodicals, pamphlets, and brochures by causes like abolition. And also, they'd even experienced false flags, like the USS Maine in 1898. So this was not entirely new to Mr. Bernays, but he really perfected the art of manipulating people. And that's not a pejorative word. One of his books, before it was called crystallizing public opinion,

it was actually a rebrand. It was called manipulating public opinion, the why and the how. So there's a few other little core ideas here. The first to understand is how Americans spent money prior to the life of Mr. Bernays. Credit cards in their modern form didn't come about until the 50s. and the way that advertising worked was that generally producers and some middlemen advertisers would outline all the different qualities of a physical product in something like a catalog or a periodical and it would have a certain amount of space in a newspaper and it would list all the

merits of the product would list how well made it was all the different aspects of it and a person would look at it and make an informed decision because the way that somebody acquired a good was that they would have to write to an address and request a product and usually send money, and then it would take several weeks or months, and then the product would be shipped to them. And you could even do this for something as large as a house. But the 20th century after the Industrial Revolution in the United States was immensely prosperous, and the demand for consumer goods began to rapidly increase, and especially in cities, where the population was rapidly increasing,

demand for products was increasing. And so to some extent, someone like Bernays was inevitable. Someone had to come along and turn this old way of advertising into something new. So to start with some just basic ideas here, Edward Bernays... Edward Bernays is the nephew of Sigmund Freud. In 1880, Jacob Bernays, the uncle of Freud's fiance, wrote a book on the concept of catharsis in Aristotle's poetic.

So that detailed a lot of the different aspects of the Freudian father-son dynamic. And also, Edward Bernays' mother was courted by Sigmund Freud from 1888 to 1886. And over four years, Sigmund Freud sent Martha Bernays over nine. hundred letters. She was the daughter of the chief rabbi of Hamburg. So Freud is marrying up endogamously, which means within the clan. And in Yiddish, there's a word for it, which is Yichus. So she brings status into the marriage. And there's something you should know about Bernays being a, especially a Viennese Jew from Austria. Viennese Jews are incredibly tribal. Most of their marriages are arranged. And it's very, up until this day,

it's very much focused on status. So Freud was actually pretty penniless and pretty low status within this environment. So in order to become a respectable person, he has to marry into a respectable family. And that delineation between the old world and the new is really not so strict for especially Western European Jews. So even though Bernays is born in America in 1891, he's very routinely going back to the Austrian Alps to go skiing with his uncle Sigmund Freud, very close to him. And he learns a lot of his methods, but we'll get to that a little bit later.

Let's see. The gist of Edward Bernays in advertising is that he took Sigmund Freud's ideas and used them to manipulate the masses. The way that he did that is by linking mass-produced goods they don't need to their unconscious desires, something like sex and violence. The theory is that if you give people enough goods to make them happy and docile, they aren't a threat to the power structure. The concept of a person in the 19th century is very different than what we consider nowadays.

A person has a public and a private self prior to the 20th century. In public, they're expected to keep their emotions under control. They're expected to dress modestly and conduct themselves morally. But Freud had a theory that by using psychoanalysis on dreams and free association between concepts, a person can uncover their subconscious sexual and violent forces, which people naturally suppress. Now, what do you do with that information? Well, to some extent, Freud wanted to use this knowledge to help uncover people's I hate to insert modern cycle babble bullshit, but trauma and help them work through it.

But Brunay's saw this mechanism and realized that he could feed on people's inner desires to get them to buy stuff. And there's some very interesting facts about Brnese. In 1917, so he's a very young man still, he's not yet 30. He was working as a press agent for an opera singer named Carrene's. Enrico Caruso. Enrico Caruso. Bernese's parents, so again, that's, you know, he's the nephew of Freud. They'd come to the United States, but he kept going back to see him very frequently. And there's a lot of other European travel that happens. Now, there's a very interesting fact that I wasn't directly able to corroborate from a primary source, but this is from a book called Conspirator's Hierarchy, the story of the command. Committee of 300 by Dr. John Coleman. They found this book, actually, in Bin Laden's Abadabad compound. This source, this book alleges that Bernays was a board member, alongside members of high

status, British people, like Rothmere, North Clip, and Walter Lipman, and that they were all part of something called Wellington House, which was the Brighamere. British War Propaganda Bureau during World War I that was founded by the Rothschilds. Bernays had read and proposed as a guide the writings of a certain Miss Walsh called The Climax of Civilization, which espoused a one-world government thesis. This Wellington House organization later became the basis of the Tavistock Institute. That's the same institute that came up with the word isolationist as a pejorative in World War I and World War II.

It was, supposedly, at the Wellington House's directive that Bernays led President Wilson to set up the Creel Commission. And this is, this secondary fact is detailed in one of my other primary sources. So this is a very different story than the narrative that Bernays tells to the public. What he says is that his vision wasn't good enough and that he wasn't able to enter the U.S. armed forces in World War I, and that he had to be a part of the Council for Public Relations, sorry, the United States Information Agency. And he was also in this capacity invited over to the peace conference in Paris, and he did a lot

of the PR stuff for most of Woodrow Wilson's administration. But depending on the source that you look at, either he's a very intense. intelligent and fortuitous man who, through his own merit at the age of, in his mid-20s, is advising President Wilson on all matters of war propaganda. Or, alternatively, he's been installed there by the Tavistock Institute and by association, the Rothschilds. Can't quite verify it, but it makes a lot more sense than the narrative he says. Another second fact that I have to back this up is that Bernays worked with Arnold Toynbee,

at the Wellington House. And I do have a physical copy. It's in a green booklet from 1915 of Arnold Toynbee's writings on the so-called Rape of Belgium by the German forces, which was all contrived and all propaganda. If you look in the book,

it's all lithographic, so it's not pictures. It's just like this overly detailed description of war propaganda, which is intended to agree of the British public against the British. So I do have that aspect of it, which is real. The British public against the Germans, I believe.

You said the British public against the British. Oh, sorry, my bad. The British public against the Germans. I mean, yeah, in some extent, it was the Brits working against the Brits and their actual interest. But anyway. Well, Brits with scare quotes there. Yeah, big scare quotes. what's interesting is that Bernays sets up what's called the Committee on Public Information in World War I.

And he was specifically tasking himself with the Latin America desk. That's important. That'll come up later. The role of the CPI was to advance pro-war narratives and also just create propaganda. In his own words, he was doing this, quote, to make the world safe for democracy. The propaganda that he chose to use to market Wilson was about how the new individual would be free in a post-war world. And then, of course, he gets back from the Paris Peace Conference. And there's an interview, and you can watch it on Archive.org. And he says, well, quote, if he's a...

I decided if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace. And they'd already perfected this technique during World War I. The CPI trained so-called four-minute men to go around to churches and fraternal organizations and women's clubs and colleges and to give little talking points to gatherings of people. By the end of the war, 75,000 of these trained people had delivered more than three quarters of a speeches reaching 315 million people. That's quite a claim. And it also is a tremendous amount of power.

And it's pretty obvious. Why would you just walk away from that much influence and propaganda and control after the war? Now, this whole time, and in many of these books, he keeps making reference to Walter Lippman. Walter Lippmann published a book called Public Opinion. He coined the term gatekeeper and explained that journalists had become the gatekeepers, the instruments of a comprehensive manipulation of public opinion. Direct quote from Lipman here, The gatekeepers decide what will be admitted to the public and what will be withheld.

Every paper when it reaches the reader is the result of a whole series of, a whole series of, of selections. So by using this rule of selection, they create a consensus in reporting, and an audience that views it sees this consensus, and it confirms their opinions. It's eventually a big marketing ploy by 1920. Propaganda starts to become a bad word because all these different sides of the conflict are using it. So you have to not have the, you can't have it to call it the CPI anymore, anything related expressly to propaganda.

You have to call the Council on Public Relations. And if you have ever seen a brief diversion here. So after the war, he set up the Council on Public Relations. When you look at a picture online of an early 20th century American city, you'll see something very different than a city of today. with all of its cars. What you'll see is hordes of people everywhere, these big, broad avenues, people walking down it. There's some carriages, but for the most part, it's just thousands and tens of thousands of people going about their lives in the city. And they're walking on foot, for the most part. And that means that the way that information gets to these people is through

social circles. Remember, it's 1920, so this is before radio and television. So in some ways it's easier to sway people, but it also requires a little bit more convincing, because in a social group there's more pressure to try and disprove something that you don't think that you can trust. After the war, Edward Bernays sends his uncle Sigmund Freud a box of Cuban cigars, and in return Freud sends him his book recently published in English, the general introduction to psychoanalysis. This is when it becomes a big problem, and Bernays gets obsessed with psychoanalysis.

Some little things about his early advertising career. Mr. Bernays is the reason why women started smoking everywhere in the world. That's quite the claim. In 1920, he meets with American Tobacco Corporation, which is a huge tobacco corporation, you'll also recall maybe that Forrestall worked there for a time. So it's a big company. It's where you go to make your bones.

And American Tobacco Corporation says, well, we'd like you to start selling cigarettes to women because right now we only have half the market of potential smokers. And we could double our profits in production, double the size of our entire industry. Well, Bernays really, realizes that he has to understand the subconscious of a woman. He goes to a psychoanalyst, a very prominent one named A.A. Brill.

And Brill says that cigarettes, operating in the Freudian school, that cigarettes represent the penis, and thus there is a taboo on male sexuality there. But if women were presented with the idea of challenging male power, then women would smoke because they have their own penises. Now, that sounds insane. But Bernays takes this idea and he realizes that he has to just make it some incendiary show. So the New York Easter Day parades, I think it's 1919 or 1920. He gets a couple hundred rich, single, pretty white women to walk in the parade. And then at Bernays's signal, they're all supposed to take cigarettes out of their clothes and spark them. And Bernays, about five minutes before this happens, he goes over to the press pool and he says,

hey, I hear that there are suffragettes and they're going to go protest by smoking, quote, torches of freedom. And so the press runs over there and they get all hopped up and taking all these pictures of all these attractive young women smoking cigarettes with this nice branded little slogan. and now the taboo is broken, and it becomes the cool thing to do. And that's how in the 1920s women began smoking cigarettes. And he does a lot with women's organizations, because now that he is using psychoanalysis to understand women's desires, he kind of can get them to feel better by using a product or service. He was employed by William Randolph Hearst to promote his new women's magazines.

you also have to consider the general metric that in the United States for every two dollars that a man makes a woman will spend three and that's not like a callous anecdote that's a real statistic there's another little point here oh his wife

Edward Bernays's wife so in 1923 he marries a woman named Doris Fleishman she was the first married woman to be issued a United States passport in her maiden name in 1925. And I'm just going to like propose something here. Okay. If you have your wife, go and get a passport in your maiden name.

And it's something no one has ever done before in the United States in the entire history. But your wife is the very first person who's somehow able to do this. I think it's pretty likely that you're able to bullshit your way out of getting drafted into World War I if you have the power and ability to alter the status and convention and regulation around U.S. passports. Just a thought. Mrs. Fleischman marched in the 1917 Women's Peace Parade in New York City and was also a very prominent suffragette. I think that's really ironic considering how she married the chief propagandist of World War I,

who was in charge of soliciting public funds and efforts and attention towards getting into the war. After her marriage with Bernays, she begins to start her own public relations firm and launch product campaigns for cottonseed oil and radium products within households. They also host ACLU events. They attend balls because she is a part of the Women's Nonpartisan Committee for the League of Nations. And they also lobby to remove the American Valuation Clause from the 1922 Fordney-McCumber tariff bill.

They also were the first They also worked a lot with the NAACP And they held the first NWACP convention Below the Mason Dixon line in Atlanta So there's kind of a progressive theme There's this word that keeps that's kind It starts with an S ends with an E It's subverse

Never mind you can keep going it's really, I mean, it's, I mean, this is not like, I mean, I guess it, it sounds very trite nowadays, like, oh, this guy's wife, like, wouldn't change her name. I mean, nowadays, that's common, right? But it kind of, it blew my mind because I did all my other research before I looked into his wife. And then it blew my mind that his wife was the first prominent American woman to not take her husband's name. And I think it's insane. that this man who was dating this like really early radical feminist is responsible for killing more women by getting them to smoke and all these other things like he makes his whole career off of manipulating especially women's spending habits i mean it's crazy it's insane stuff but i digress here Bernays's rise to power. The whole time he's doing this, he's not just going from, you know, it's not like a rags to riches story.

He's already at the top of his game right after World War I. He had clients, including President Coolidge, funny little story. You might know him as Silent Cal. Well, people didn't really like Coolidge. So Edward Bernays goes to the White House and offers his services in the early 1920s and lines up about 30 different celebrities and takes pictures with them and goes to all of his media friends because everyone wants to take pictures with the celebrities of course and it's the big hot item and now you have this very sociable president allegedly

imagine that kind of power that you can do the public relations for the president into the United States in your late 20s. He has other clients, though, Procter & Gamble, General Electric, what would become CBS, Dodge Motors. One of the sources that I read claimed that the Council on Foreign Relations specifically installed him at CBS. And if you know anything about CBS in the 20th century,

it was one of, if not, the most prominent television and radio media organization in the United States. There's some very... Well, there was only three TV stations at one point. It was just CBS, ABC, and NBC. Yeah. And CBS, even back then, was known as the CIA broadcasting system. Well, this is pre-CIA, but after the CIA comes in.

But it was pretty well known that intelligence worked through there. Oh, yeah. Office-enable intelligence and, you know, places like that. You'll like my next example, because... I, to make a brief digression, I always assumed that, like, a lot of the insanity that we perceive in this country started kind of after World War II. But reading this, it really kind of resets that clock back a lot earlier. In the 1920s, Edward Bernays, he starts publishing Freud's books in the United States. and, well, of course, he's publishing them in English, so he might as well be the press agent.

He might as well be the one promoting them in the United States. And if you understand something about Freudianism, it just took off. It became the hot thing to do at parties. People at parties in the United States, the Hoy-Polloy in the 1930s, they would have this whole, they would psychoanalyze each other at these parties. They all have their hors d'oeuvres. and they would they would kind of play this not kind of game,

but they'd try to get each other to do a Freudian slip. So if you had a Freudian slip in front of your friends, they would say, aha, you know, you actually express this desire. It became kind of this

fashionable and trendy thing to do. And I thought that was kind of, you know, a cute little anecdote. But when you begin to realize just how much control that Bernays has over everything that's happening. He singularly invented the concept of public relations. And all throughout the 20s,

30s and 40s, he's establishing them at every major university, at every major business, in every arm of the government that he can approach. And he's marketing it is this science that's married with psychology, and it seeks the truth. The whole time, he's just gaining more and more and more influence. Now, of course, you mentioned that Bernays and the kind of tactics would later be used by the CIA in the 1960s and so on. But a really interesting example I found was actually in 1920. And the first example of a Bernasian-style regime change was in Lithuania in 1920. I'll just read this quote from you. And tell me if this sounds familiar to you. the sense. A Lithuanian National Council was organized, composed of prominent American

Lithuanians, and a Lithuanian Information Bureau was established to act as a clearinghouse for news about the country, and for special pleading on behalf of Lithuania's ambitions. The Public Relations Council, who was retained to direct this work, recognized that the first problem to be solved was America's indifference to an ignorance. about Lithuania and its desires. When the Lithuanian Information Bureau went before the press associations to correct, inaccurate or misleading Polish news about the Lithuanian situation, it came there as a representative of a group which figured largely in the American news

for a number of weeks as a result to the advice and activities of its public relations Council. They represented now to the State Department and appearing before members of Congress as a spokesman for a country that could no longer be unknown or ignored. Some people described this campaign as the campaign of, quote, advertising a nation to freedom. And one interesting thing about this example is that when he's talking about the Lithuanians, you know, progressing towards democracy. He notes that there's stiff political opposition within Lithuania to this change in government and that they just have to be, well, I mean, realistically bulldozed by special pleading in order to have their country changed and to get rid of

these things. And if you are familiar with the CIA history, Bernays helped found the United States Information Agency and that did Radio Free Europe and Voice of America and later on even I would say it's very timely with the disruption of USA

that Trump shut down recently it's very apparent to me that this tactic metastasized across all these different media platforms and all these different countries. And it's, you know, that was in 1920 with Lithuania. It's been a hundred years of running this tactic, all originated by Edward Bernays.

And I want to just draw up some other examples here. Tobacco, for example. Well, I mean, I brought up the feminists supposedly smoking, but people still were not buying as many cigarettes as he would have liked. So in the 1920s, he created an ad campaign called the Tobacco Society for Voice Culture to, quote, help singers overcome voice irritation. And then, of course, that's, like, his lobbying group that he's created, that's very passionate.

They're all paid actors. And then he creates this, like, fake, this fake supposedly neutral organization, which is also funded by him called the Tobacco Infirmation Sorcerment. Service Bureau. And the nature of how he conducts his public relations BS is that he has this intense activist group coupled with this supposedly informative organization that's neutral and above it all. And he creates kind of this entire artificial public square for these ideas supposedly to be

debated, but the whole show and every aspect of this group is paid out by Bernays and picked up by other public relations corps at different newspapers, which are controlled by Bernays. And they run advertisements with actors paid by Bernays, which will publish reports from scientists that are paid by Bernays. So when you consider everything from modern prescription medications to smoking, to even people eating bacon for breakfast in this country. It is all the direct result of campaigns that are done by Edward Bernays. In 1928, he published his book, Propaganda. Propaganda is a great book. If you haven't read it, I mean, you may have, but it's phenomenal. It's really, it's short, too. It's a very easy read.

there are whole sections that you will circle so that you can come back to later. Yeah, it's a, it's required reading. Let's put it that way. I'll just read you the first paragraph. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute, an invisible government that is the true ruling power of our country.

While you're reading that, let me read the first paragraph of engineering, the engineering of consent. I do this all the time. Every once in a while, copy and paste it and throw it up on X. Freedom of speech and its democratic corollary, a free press, have tacitly expanded our Bill of Rights to include the right of persuasion. This development was inevitable, an inevitable result of the expansion of the media of free speech and persuasion. All these media provide open doors to the public mind.

Any one of us through these media may influence the attitudes and actions of our fellow citizens. Absolutely. And there's something that I noticed about these books, the real evil here. When I was listening to the first episode and reading through the sources, I initially thought that this was prescriptive, as in this was what he thought the ideal mechanism should be for how to conduct public relations, albeit cynical, but just a sort of ideal.

This is descriptive. There's a book I found from 1947, and it's just an anthology of every single media appearance that the editors could get their hands on. and it's 500 different examples of Edward Bernays using public relations as a tool for everything from milk to the Hawaiian University to dresses to getting women to wear different types of hats to the propaganda offices in World War II. It's the same playbook over and over and over again. This is prescriptive because at this point, the information and the tactics that he's doing, this is not like a rise to fame by the late 1920s.

He's already in with the group. This is just the material that's being spread throughout the invisible government that is the true ruling power of our country. This is just the playbook that's being published for them so that they can copy his successes. And he also cites a lot of whatever you'd like to call them. New World Order, One World Government, people like H.G. Wells. What Mr. Wells says of political processes is equally true of commercial and social processes and all manifestations of mass activity. When the Constitution was adopted, the unit of organization was the village community,

which produced the greater part of its own necessary commodities and generated its group ideas and opinions by personal contact and discussion directly among its citizens. But today, because ideas can be instantaneously transmitted to any distance and to any number of people, this geographical integration has been supplanted by many other kinds of grouping, so that persons having the same ideas and interests may be associated and regimented for common action,

even though they live thousands of miles apart. And there's a separate take that I saw from people that worked with Bernays in the 1920s to the 1940s. And they said that the way that Bernays saw people, the way that he saw humanity, was not as like individual friends or units or ethnic groups or religions or anything. He saw them only on the scale of thousands of people. It's the only quantity of humanity that he actually considered in his work. And that really begins to show. There's other examples of this. In July of 1928, he publishes in the American Journal of Sociology,

what would later become crystallizing public opinion, but it was actually called, in its first instance, manipulating public opinion, the why and the how printed for private circulation. Now here's a quote from it. Occasionally the manipulation of the public mind entails the removal of a prejudice. Prejudices are often the application of old taboos to new conditions. They are illogical, emotional, and hampering to progress. Take, for example, the feeling that used to exist against margarine.

Today, margarine is made of pure vegetable ingredients that have been scientifically determined upon as wholesome and past as pure by the government. And, well, let's posit something here, which is that if you control the government, and if you control the industry, and if you control the scientific, even the metaphysical concept of consensus among institutions, if you direct, control all of those things. Well, what if you're wrong? What if you're wrong? What if the thing that you're trying to get rid of and get out of people is not their prejudices of old taboos to new conditions? What if margarine isn't good for you? What if what you're doing to people isn't the truth? The scary thing about Bernays is over and over and over again. He's referring to his evil mechanism as truth, that everything that a public relations department will do is spread the truth to better inform people. And that's not the quantity of material that he's producing.

It's not like an idle thing and it's not even believing his own BS. He really does think that this is some ancient truth that he has discovered and that if he's using it, it can never be wrong. He never has regrets for his entire life on this until the very end, but I'll save that. How does this work exactly? Well, in a magazine called Public Utilities Fortnightly in November 1930, he says, well, quote,

there are psychological principles behind all behavior. He who would influence or attempt to control behavior needs to understand these principles, too. Behavior is reciprocal. The public attitude towards an organization reflects the organization's attitude toward it, and that attitude must be expressed in acts, not merely word.

The public must be definitely guided and influenced toward the desired actions. The public is not a mass in point three. It is a series of interlocking groups with varying motivations of molding different groups towards an end. The need for skilled shaping, of such a policy have created the profession of public relations council.

And another thing to point out, if he had just stuck to advertising, I mean, evil, manipulative, but perhaps not so bad if it's getting people to go and buy things. But he's not just convincing people to go out to a store and buy products or to follow trends. In 1930, he is heavily involved with the modern art movement, and he has personal correspondence in association with Eleanor Roosevelt. He also is responsible in 1932 and 1936 for the public relations image of FDR. So all of FDR's fireside chats, Edward Bernays, right? Every fireside chat is started with the term, my friends.

What else is he doing in this time? Well, there's some really strange thing. He's very in demand because he's performing all these functions for all these people. Wealthy public figures that hire him were persuaded to be photographed in cheap hotels and ride buses. Luggage sales soared when women were told to take at least three dresses on a trip. More people bought bacon for breakfast when there was a bacon over supply. And he had the pork sellers, wanted Bernays, to start helping them sell more of it. He got in 1929 or so, he got Herbert Hoover, the president, Henry Ford, and an elderly Thomas Edison for the Lights Golden Chubilee event in Michigan.

He also worked for the Rockefeller Center to open construction sites for the public view to help mitigate their, public perception. And in the 1930s, he writes what was manipulating public opinion and how it becomes crystallizing public opinion. He begins

to connect publicity in public relations. I don't know which one. I don't know which one of those is worse. Manipulating is an action. Crystallizing is basically, look, you're going to do it.

It's done. Oh yeah, because at that point it was done. And this next quote, publicity became part of the machinery of regulatory commissions set up under governments such as the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. It was used by state governments and the administration of minimum wage laws, especially in Massachusetts. It became part of the program of municipal research leagues and principal cities, and it furnished the basis. of a movement for wide governmental control. And again, this is descriptive. This has already happened with FDR and the New Deal.

And this is a huge part of it, exactly like you say, right, crystallizing it, it's settled. It's done. And his whole, his whole, like, high and mighty attitude about this really starts to become a problem in World War II. So in June of 1941, he goes to the, I think it's the Institute of War Colleges, one of these names. And he always has these great names for what public relations should be called. They always sound, you know, in our modern language, it sounds very, like, unbelievable. There's no way they would call it. But this was 80 years ago.

So people were a little bit more amenable to stuff like. this in June of 1941. First, a moral commission of experts, advisors should be created to drop a master plan for morale and psychological warfare.

Second, a program to strengthen faith in democracy. Third, a program to strengthen democracy itself. And fourth, a program to sell the army to the people and the people to the army. What this eventually becomes in World War II is the Office of War Information. In 1942, he addresses the U.S. Army, quote, total warfare has three fronts, military, economic,

and psychological. And again, total warfare. And you've covered kind of the implications of that on your show previously. In order to achieve total warfare, they must be integrated. It is my thesis that with which censorship and psychological front propaganda are so directly concerned, it's an agent of integration, which will strengthen the military and economic fronts and wield all three into the necessary effective whole. Censorship should be a function of the broad psychological front concerned with public morale in the widest sense. Today, it's only military and leaves the public in the middle.

So he's expressly advocating for psychological warfare and censorship to control the mindset of the American people in World War II. It's from a primary source that he wrote for the U.S. Army. But he doesn't just stop with the kind of craziness there. In 1945, he publishes a book that I couldn't find anywhere. but it's, I wish I could find a copy of it. It's called Take Your Place at the Peace Table, which advocates for the United Nations. It's, quote, a practical and realistic guidebook to action

on how to mold public opinion in support of a, in all caps here, world security organization. And I have a lot of books from the mid-and-late 1940s on world governments, one world order, all that stuff. Bernays' method of doing this in this book, and I could only find this in a secondary source, is that everyone from the highest levels of government, down through Congress, down to your bowling club and churches,

can become an activist to help preserve democracy and maintain the peace and advocate in terms of public opinion and support of a world security organization. That's the purpose of the book. So he also brags about his previous successes. He publishes another book around this time called The Minority Rules, and he cites himself. Another interesting literary example is the minority movement of psychoanalysis, which, starting with a small group of half a dozen scientists in Vienna, widened its influence in larger and even larger circles, until today the psychological novel, biography, and history

have all responded to its impulse. He's describing it as though it's entirely separate from him, but he had the sole publishing rights and was the press agent for all of Freud's circle in Vienna. So he's, again, descriptively bragging about a public relationship, success. He has some very interesting thoughts on the minority of people, right? He just kind of broadly labels them as intelligent. Intelligent people are recognizing the difficulty of convincing the public of facts that are against its own interests in the active proselytizing

minorities in whom personal and public interests necessarily coincide by the progress and development of America. A lot of this kind of wishy-washy liberalism speak. Where does... Okay, sorry, I'm going chronologically here,

so I might be a little disjointed. 1946, an interview with him and Eleanor Roosevelt, who he was very close with, was published. He's interviewing her as to whether there should be a secretary of public relations

in the cabinet of the United States. And she says yes, they need a peacetime agency in the U.S. that's comparable to the office of wartime information. So this lunatic,

Edward Bernays, wanted to make this public relations manipulation a cabinet level position. And he just continues on with some other crazy stuff here. 1947, he advocates for spam mail. So you've opened your mailbox, and there's

advertisements in it, and you might wonder, how does that start? Well, you see, according to Bernays, who helped start this process, our civilization is in a race between communication, and that includes direct mail and hyphens, and chaos. We know that what we call society. is only a network of partial understanding held together by communication in which the mail plays an important part. So he advocates for direct mailing of advertising.

And that's crazy. Now we get to 1947, where he publishes the Engineering of Consent. Let's see here. The last paragraph of the Engineering of Consent, when the public is convinced of the soundness of an idea, it will proceed to action. People translate an idea into action suggested by the idea itself, whether it is ideological, political, or social. They may adopt a philosophy that stresses racial and religious tolerance. They may vote a new dealer into office, or they may organize a consumer's

buying strike, but such results do not just happen. In a democracy, they may be accomplished principally by the engineering of consent. Really just unbelievable stuff. Let's see here. Well, it's just so brazen in its openness, and he knows that the only people who are going to read this are elites and academics. And, yeah, it just continues their reign.

Absolutely. And he, he's published in all of these different sources. So he's getting published by like, you know, this like a magazine, like public utilities fortnightly or household magazine or whatever it is or New York or whatever. And he knows how to tailor his message for each of these publications because he's only ever thinking of them as special pleading from special interests. So if you. You only think of humanity, right, as just this block. It's just something to be controlled. Let's see here. For Household magazine, February 1949, the article he wrote is why we behave like inhuman beings. Thus, science, with its modern equipment of experiment and method, is seeking to solve the problem of inhuman behavior through greater and greater knowledge of man in the world in which he lives, which of course, Brunez controls. The key to our liberation from our jungle heritage of force

and fraud lies in accelerated self-understanding. The truth shall indeed make us free when we learn with the same control we exercise over the physical nature, that it must now be the truth about ourselves. He also is in favor of this next one will lend some credence, I think, to the Wellington House, Rothschild angle of it. 1949 on British tariffs. America must do her part two from an economic angle.

She must lower tariffs if they keep out British goods that Britain produces better and cheaper. What the fuck in 1949 could Britain have produced better and cheaper? than the United States. America must encourage, rather than discourage, British insurance companies. Should encourage the tourist traffic me than we do. Must realize that shipping is a British forte.

What the U.S. and Britain should create is a joint committee on furthering common understandings. So a lot of this Anglo-American sentiment after the war. Something a little bit lighter. in 1950 I want to add after this point after the war his power is total

he can advertise and sell and do whatever the heck that he wants because he's made all of the most powerful people in this country absolutely insanely ludicrously wealthy and I'm not talking about your

old Anglo American aristocrats I'm talking about your late 19th early 20th century arrivals. He has a 1950 interview on how to be a public relations man. Which is basically

how to be a manipulative asshole. Be open-minded, sympathetic to the viewpoint of other fellows. Don't sound off with your own views or announce that you won't listen to any argument or show impatience with views of others. Be tactful objective. Be diplomatic.

If you disagree with someone, let him know you respect his intelligence. and intentions. And when I start to see all of these PR types of people, when I see kind of the regime as it was constructed under the pandemic and also all of these other just NGO types, the way in which these media types interact with each other and they address the public, it's all directly out of the Bernays playbook. It's nuts.

It just gets me so angry. I mean, it continues on here. Another interesting view on race from Edward Bernays, 1950. He goes to the University of Hawaii. What does he like about Hawaii? Well, I'll list the points he says for you. Hawaii disproves Soviet accusations that imperialism and racism

are our national policy. Hawaii dramatizes to the mainland that Americans of most diverse backgrounds can live together in harmony. Hawaii demonstrates that all of these people can successfully work out their destiny democratically. For Hawaii to fully meet these goals,

it would only need a very slight change of attitude on the part of a very small number of people towards the residual problems discussed here. and you know if you know anything about Hawaii you know it's not quite that not quite that in the 1950s this is an interesting little thing here he was the PR man for the aluminum company of America which they had a whole bunch of I think it was it was a fluoride derivative like like a stable form of fluoride that they had to get rid of so he then used the American Dental Association to fluoridate the U.S. water supply.

That was Edward Bernays, if you're wondering, who did that? And the interesting part about all these different ad campaigns and things is they never get rolled back and they never get reconsider. Once something is in effect, it just is. The fluoridation of the U.S. water supply began 70 years ago, and all because of one man, just to solve a temporary problem of getting rid of a fluoride product. Let's see.

In 1953, he writes a paper for the State Department recommending setting up a psychological warfare office. Another interesting thing he was doing during the early 1950s, you know, psychological warfare you can associate with the CIA, but he was the Public Relations Council to the United Fruit Corporation. They overthrew the government in Guatemala, and Bernays was responsible for writing all of the propaganda that the CIA used to do that. And you have to consider that when the agency finds a tactic that it likes and is very effective and very covert, they're just going to keep using it. And public relations by the early 1950s has really grown, really, really grown. In fiscal year in 1952, this is Brené's own figures. There were approximately 2,600 full-time public relations employees on the payroll of the United States, plus another 1,000 who are working full-time but in like a part-time pay slot.

This does not include many individuals on federal payrolls, for in many cases the governmental departments, in order to avoid public accusation that they are propagandizing, call their public relations and public information employees by other names. In certain cases, these men and women battle for public opinion and appropriations. I asked the audience to consider the latest USAID function in this context with that information. Let's see, going on here. The United States had an official propaganda agency that Edward Bernays ran between August, 1953, in October of 1999. This agency, after its dissolution at that time, was directly superseded by the Department of State's

Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Office. It's just, I mean, so again, that fact establishes direct continuity between Edward Bernays and our current Leviathan that Trump is dismantling. But I want to give a little bit more of an inside view about Bernays. I have an example here, which will get kind of deep under the skin of what this man was doing at the government. Because to kind of just recap a little bit, anyone who knows about Bernays knows about his role in propaganda and consumerism.

At the most shallow level, it's getting people to buy things. At a deeper level, it's manipulating people's consumer preferences. is. But one thing that people do not know, and I'm about to bring light to, is what he was doing within the federal government. And the source that I use is an original primary source from 1955. It's a book called Billions, Blunders, and Bologna by a man named Eugene Castle. Now, you and I have never heard of Eugene Castle, because we're not 90 years old. But edited by Castle Films was at the bottom process of the title screen for most major films in the United States. In World War II, Castle Films was the sole distributor of propaganda to non-theatrical audiences.

That includes all defense training films, all Army, Navy, and Red Cross films, and this company, Castle Films, made over a thousand productions during its tenure and was the largest non-theatrical film operation in the world at its time of existing. So he wrote a book and he calls out the United States Information Agency, which later becomes Department of State, which later becomes the USAID, whatever propaganda head that's going on in the federal government. Eugene Castle has seen and been inside all of these things, and so I'm just going to read this section in full, and I hope it'll shed some light on Mr. Bernays. Direct quote here, wasting millions of dollars every year has become a fixed policy and procedure with our propagandists in Washington. Again, the year is 1955-ish. The U.S. Information Agency does not wait until June 30th the date when Congress makes its full appropriation available for the ensuing year. Six months before the U.S.IA is entitled to any new money, the agency heads send urgent appeals to their employees scattered all over the world to prompt them to, quote, dream up the biggest, most expensive projects they can conceive, and send these post-haste to Washington to enable to enable the agency.

directors there to rush to Congress with an emergency appeal for supplementary funds. These extra millions, supposedly to be spent for promotional dreams abroad, invariably never go beyond the paper they are written on, but the great money-getting event is the annual budget. Washington's big spending agencies carefully plan many months in advance how to influence legislators to increase their forthcoming budgets. revitalized campaign to influence economy-minded members of the 1955 and 1956 appropriations committees, and, at the same time, to lessen complaints from American taxpayers, came into being with an announcement by Edward L. Bernays, freelance New York press agent,

that he had formed a committee of 28 persons to propagandize the American people into thinking well of the United States Information Agency. Never a shy one for personal promotion, Bernays appointed himself both chairman and chief spokesman for the group to be known as the National Committee for an Adequate Overseas U.S. Information Program, with headquarters at the Bernays Publicity Office in New York. In a press release issued on Monday, October 25, 1954, the objectives of the committee were defined as stimulating international understanding of America, counteracting communist propaganda, and strengthening bonds with our allies. Chairman Bernays further described his committee as an educational, non-pressure group, when asked by reporter

Harold Hutchings of the Chicago Tribune, whether the committee was formed to campaign for higher appropriations by Congress, Bernays said that was not the plan. We will not in any attempt we will not attempt in any sense to be a lobby, he said, but he added, as far as I am personally concerned, $100 million a year is an inadequate sum for this work. 24 hours before the release of the Bernays announcement, USIA Director Stribert, in an interview, commending both himself and his propaganda agency, which appeared in the Washington Sunday Star, highly approved the objectives of the Bernays group. An excerpt follows, some members of the newly.

formed National Committee for an adequate United States Information Program headed by public relations expert Edward L. Bernays feel the agency should have an annual budget of $125 million, and the director should have a cabinet status. When questioned about this article, Bernays characterized it as, quote, extremely unfortunate, and he added, makes it seem as if we're advocating a Dr. Goebbels for America.

Let's see, to do onward here. A lot of the blame, and this is like a separate point now here. Before I move on to the next point, notice what he's doing here. He's using his own public relations playbook of manipulation on Congress. It's no longer about the American people. He's not trying to get money for consumer products at this point. He is running propaganda for his own propaganda agency at the government, not only to establish himself as a cabinet-level official,

but also to get 25% more than he requests. So it's this whole thing. Excuse my language, is just a fucking game for him. He creates a partisan interest group. He creates his own status as the chair of that group. And he has his own program that he's managing, but will distance himself through several other proxies. And he's also looped in the media to report on it and hype each other up with these different organizations.

So by the time this whole carefully coordinated package gets to Congress, it seems as though everybody in the world wants this act to happen. And consider that amount of money. In 2025 money, that $125 million, well, that's now $1.5 billion that is just for propaganda for the United States. and we can disagree, not you and I, but people can disagree with the anti-communist activity and propaganda that occurred in the 1950s and how we would combat Soviet influence all over the world. But this tactic, this mechanism that Bernays is using continues on and is used, and is used everywhere, ubiquitously, by the U.S. government in order to do all of its appropriations and to do all of its lobbying and to do all of its special pleading, both externally around the world and internally within him, within itself. And that, in my mind, is insane because Bernays never shuts up in any of his works about how.

wonderfully democratic all of this really is when he controls every single aspect of what's occurring here. So I've been going there. So any thoughts on that, Pete? Well, yeah, I mean, this couldn't be more timely, right, with everything that's happening. Just to prove that this didn't just happen like in the last 10 years. This wasn't because Obama came into office. And what was the act that he overturned to that allows the government to propagandize us? Was that smooth?

Am I thinking Smoot Hawley? What the hell was that thing called? That might be it. Why am I thinking? Smoot Holly is a tariff act. Oh, yeah. Well, forgive me, I have tariffs on the brain too as well. Maybe you're thinking the 96 Clinton.

Telecommunications Act. That might, it was something else. I can't remember. People who are listening or screaming, screaming right now, they know exactly what it is. But yeah,

it's just one of those things where what we think has been created recently. This is, this explains why boomers are the way they are. This explains why, you know, no one, we haven't had free things.

until we haven't have people thinking outside of the box in any kind of mass way until the internet came along. And now you can, you have access to information that they didn't have. And also you can, there's alternative sources of alternative outlets where people can get their news where they can't really control this anymore, although they do. obviously there's probably things that I say that were in a lab that I bought, you know, were created in a propaganda lab that I bought into. And, you know, just one of those things you just got to be as careful as possible. But, yeah, I mean, more than anything, it means this is not, this is nothing new. The crazy part, I mean, when doing research for this, I felt like I was going schizophrenic,

because all these slogans that you think are just kind of happy American Indians, like, One example, when it rains, it pours. Well, that was the 1913 Morton Salt Company slogan. Diamonds are forever. Debears, public relations. Debears. Oh, the act I was thinking of was the Smith Mundek. Ah, gotcha.

Let's see here. There's one last point, and then I have some kind of meta-prospective on this. So you might have reached this point, dear audience. where this man goes from a salesman, a press agent, and acquires and garners more and more and more political power and manipulates more and more consumer preferences and eventually is able to manipulate the entire federal government to just give him whatever money for whatever he wants. That's a pretty meteoric rise to power. And he does actively maintain control throughout his entire life. he lives to be 103. So this goes into the, you know, he was even still up involved into the campaign of George H.W. Bush.

And everything that I've mentioned here, the really crazy insane part, this is just expressly and explicitly what he directly did in his life. Only him that is not to account for all of the different public relations departments that now exist. all of the other highly intelligent people that took his methods and put them to other evil uses. And when you look at our media environment, I used to say, okay, well, there's a lot of manipulation here. It's only Bernays. Everything that you're seeing was thought up by Bernays. Or some second order effect, the focus group. this would eventually come out of the psychology of it.

And it just goes on and on and on. And the thing I really hate about advertising is you can't escape it. And it's so easy. You just buy some ad space, right? So now there's really not reason to have ads. Anyway, I'm getting a little bit into like what I'd talk about later. I want to talk about the final important point here, which is, did this asshole ever feel a little bit of remorse or a little bit of moral compunction for his actions? Because his entire life, he really doesn't and everything he writes from the 1910s all the way until the 1990s or so.

In 1992, he writes one letter to a state legislature. And what he writes in favor of is a bill on the floor. And it's going to sound psycho. He thinks that public relations workers should have licensing. They should have a license to be a public relations worker. That should fix it. That should fix the entire fucked 20th century that you've almost single-handedly created with your propaganda.

You just give all these people a license. I'll read a direct quote here. And this, I think, is as close as you are going to get to a shred of remorse for his actions. At the end of his life. And by the way, he's 101 years old when he's writing this. 101. Those persons who heavily influence the channels of communication and action in immediate dominated society should be held accountable and responsible for their influence.

In the case of public relations, where millions of lives can be in jeopardy, no such requirement exists. While in the field of medicine, the body is vulnerable. In public relations, it is the mind. Ethical behavior needn't be spelled out. There is no universal definition. Simply put, standard Judeo-Christian ethics, based on integrity and honesty, are necessary for a public relations practitioner to properly practice his profession.

Doctors must take a Hippocratic oath upon entering their profession. Public relations practitioners should do the same. So that's crazy. That's crazy because this guy, this guy, paid scientists and doctors to make fake studies, to back up fake focus groups, to back up fake newspapers, to get the American consumer to start consuming by the, God. Okay, I mean, it's an indirect effect. To become a consumption society, basically.

And yeah, I think it's great that even in his, I mean, do we even want to call this AmeriCulpa? He uses the propaganda term Judeo-Christian. Yeah, and this guy's like, you know, I mean, oh my God. And it's like so insidious. Okay, what do I, what do I start on kind of the meta of this? The meta of this is that he has this weird God complex his entire life where he determines what truth is. And that if there's just enough, quote, information out there that people will somehow make, whatever an informed decision is.

But he's a very intelligent man. He wrote tons and tons of books. And in all of his efforts, occasionally I found, and this is just the primary source references, there's something like 500 different articles, books, interviews, and other media appearances that he advocates, he does some kind of PR work for like a specific cause, like a milk company or a public utilities company or the military or a college or whatever, right? Just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.

And these are just like the published ones. The whole time, you know, sometimes he'll kind of throw out, well, maybe propaganda can be used for evil. But mostly that's just, you know, mostly it's used for good when it aspires to the truth because it's for democracy. And the whole time, he's just throwing every single time he's using this mealy-mouth tactic. When, oh, well, okay, people need to buy more milk. Well, in order to buy more milk, you have to be a more well-informed consumer. And in a democracy, we have to reach a consensus about the benefit of milk. And everybody involved in the production and consumption of milk should work together.

and therefore we'll have a more informed society to consume our products together. And this guy had the same, I mean, really it's this mechanism that he's just taking and there's zero. Like you said, right at the start, totally amoral. I don't think he had like a crisis of conscience about this because there's televised interviews of him in 1987 in 1990 and 1992. They sit him down with this lefty in 1992, and he's 100 years old at this point. And the lefty guy is asking him, like, well, you know, don't you feel like a little bit bad that you've turned us into this mass consumption society? And he says, like, well, you know, if it's for progress, if it's for democracy. And I'm reminded of that book, you went through a little bit earlier, that true believer.

And the part that, like, is really depressing is, uh, he used his uncle, Sigmund Freud's psychology to do all of this, right? He prayed on people, people's innermost fears and their insecurities and, you know, our people to just, I can't put it lightly, our people, our grandparents, our parents, our great-grandparents lived in this world. where this maniac could convince them to do anything, to buy anything, to go to war for anything, to vote for anything. Public relations as, I mean, our Pentagon now,

every branch of the military has a public relations department. J.D. Vance, public affairs, I think, in the Marine Corps, the White House Press Corps another creation of public relations the White House Press Secretary and that's just this is all like the highest levels and nowadays you can't even think

about it when there's a scandal when something goes wrong for your business let's say you have a smaller medium-sized business there's two things that you have to get in order to fight some big problem

right some big scandal you have to get a legal team and you have to get a public relations firm. And I kind of had this epiphany when I was reading through and researching all this stuff. The real reason that Trump got elected president and the reason a lot of people are just so, I'm not even going to call it overjoyed. They are righteously justified and being gleeful that this apparatus is being dismantled. is because you can only manipulate and lie and fool and trick people and take their money for so long. It's not this infinite thing.

I'm amazed that this manipulative playbook just happened and was carried out for a hundred straight years, a hundred years of just fooling the public. And more evil than fooling. I mean, giving them carcinogenic, selling them carcinogenic products with radium in it. And, you know, carcinogenic seed oils and plastics and, you know, you can do whatever you want to people when you can control every aspect of their mind. And, you know, that's a great evil because it also removes the biggest evil of Bernays was not just that he was. was doing it, not just that he was inflicting all this evil upon all these people, hundreds of millions of people around the world for 100 years.

Because by the way, this mechanism got exported through USAID and all these other federal agencies and media and whatever else. This went all over the fucking world to every other country on the planet, starting with Lithuania in 1920 and Guatemala under Bernays in 1950s or so. right this goes everywhere so it's not just the harm inflicted on everybody on the planet but it's also a really bad part of it a really dark part of it is that the people that are committing the evil the people themselves that are doing the public relations and the public affairs and the propagandists they're so far disconnected now from both bernays and the tactics and the time

in which this originated, that it's, it's, on the one hand, they don't feel any connection to any of the evil that they do because it's an institution that's been in effect for so long, right? So they really don't even grasp how evil it is

to manipulate and to do public relations on the public. But the more insidious angle is that, you know, they think, they think, they think, They think that it helps. They think they're doing the public a service.

There's not anything outside of this paradigm. That's like the part that blows my mind with all this public relations crap. It's been so instituted at every aspect of our society that we can't imagine a functioning world without it. Right? The terms that we use, gatekeeper, Walter Lipman, stereotype, Walter Lipman. stereotype Walter Lipman you know engineering consent

people will say it's Chomsky it's Bernays you know the language that we use the way that we conceptualize it even propaganda and public relations the words the etymology of what we say is outside of our control it's baked into how we speak to each other

even on the right and I I'm ranting a bit, but it just the extent of it. And I did my best to like read right wing sources as best as I could to help understand this

because when I was doing my research on primary sources and I have a lot of original from the 20s through the 70s or so, original right wing books that were published and hardcover. And I really fit. to find much on Bernays, on public relations. Some of it's about propaganda, but most of it was about communist propaganda.

I found a little bit on Freud and Bernays from John Murray Cudahees, The Ordeal of Civility, about the Jewish struggle with modernity. Another one that I read was a barbarian inside the gates by Don de Grand Prix. He wrote a little bit of a section on Edward Bernays and Walter Mitt Lippman, and he said it, quote, deals with manipulation of the mind on a mass scale. And

one person that I thought, well, there's two more final quotes, and these are by right-wing authors, so. One is Liberty or Equality by Eric Fond, Kuhn-Outland. It says, a tempered non-historical belief is also necessary in state and society, a sneering, contemptuous

attitude pregnant with suspicious, and animosities is neither natural nor constructive. It is moreover evident that sound hierarchies can only be based on affection and reason. And then there's a de Meister quote, No sovereign power is strong enough to govern several millions of men unless it is aided by religion or slavery or both. And other recommendations, watch the 1976 film network, because people were aware of this. A lot of the anti-consumerist sentiment in this country

was actually carried on by the left. Now, they do the window-dressing bullshit of saying it's all capitalism, it's all conducted by the bourgeoisie class of people, and that the way out of this is establishing class consciousness, and all that I think is crap. Because this capitalism and consumption that the left critiques so much about our modern world was instituted by Bernays. And there's an astonishing amount of illiteracy about the specific people. This is what the right has over the left.

We know the names at this point of these people. We can take it out of the realm of these abstract ideas. and it no longer has to be this kind of, because when you make a concept, this is, again, even self-referentially, a Bernasian thing. If you make something, a consensus-based, abstract concept

that sounds reasonable and agreeable, it'll just trap you in this paradigm, like a rat in a cage. And thinking outside of it, thinking about, you know, capitalism is not this. this big nebulous thing. There are people.

They have names. These ideas didn't come from nowhere. It wasn't because of a big mega corporation or because of a robber barbaran, which you've seen the stormy episode. You know, that's pretty stupid. This advertising consumption-based culture under Edward Bernays totally displaced the American aristocracy because these new people that were instituting it in public relations of,

usually a certain tribe or persuasion, or at least a certain lack of moral fortitude, they used it to seize power in the United States, and they used it to circulate information to each other. And again, I think researching this stream drove me a little schizo, because Bernays had his hand in everything. it all goes back to him. And I think it's a breath of fresh air that Trump is going after USAID. And as we learn more and more and more about this, just how much of our money was going to this stuff, you know, it helps answer this central opinion. This central question that the right kind of has now. Why is all of our money going to transgender Guatemalans?

or, you know, all these other things, all these other social causes in other countries. What the hell is the point of all that? Well, it's because if you can propagandize this insanity and make it agreed upon, you can institute regime change or soft power everywhere in the world with minimum investment, like you're opening a new market for some tennis shoes. So anyway, I've ranted long enough. No, that was great. I didn't want to add something.

You were talking about, like, interviews he did. I've known this for years. I used to mention it all the time. April 4, 1985, he was on David Letterman, the David Letterman show. Really? Yeah, he did an eight-minute segment on there. and he was introduced as Dr. Edward Bourdais. Get the fuck out of here.

Yeah. And he did that on purpose and he came out and one of the, you know, and Letterman starts asking about propaganda. He's like, well, you introduced me as doctor. Why would I have you introduce me as doctor? Because it lends credibility. It's a propaganda device. It's amazing.

It's on YouTube. It's eight minutes on. on YouTube. Oh, that's nuts. Yeah. I mean, the guy was like totally, you know, in a weird, you know, you got to respect, I don't want to say respect it, but I'm just kind of an awe of how freaking good this guy was at manipulation. Like the devil himself. It really, like, and you can, the reason I kind of stayed away throughout most of this talk from a lot of the Rothschild stuff and Wellington House and Tavistock Institute or whatever else is because you don't need you don't even need to like get that far deep into it to understand why it's evil it's not evil because it's I mean yes it is heavily involved with some of the worst people to ever live on the face of the earth but more importantly the mechanism itself is dehumanizing it's brainwashing. It's, and I also think it's important to talk about this because, like you say earlier, we're moving into the real internet age, right, the real result of a change of the inability of the elite to manage opinion and consensus and to drive narratives out.

And I mean, I'm approximately 30. And I'm realizing that people younger than me, they didn't grow up in the same world that I think, not to say you and I did, but I remember a world of the internet. Sorry, remember a world of radio and a world of television and newspapers, physical hard newspapers, and periodicals. And even though I was a young kid at the time, there was nothing outside of it. If you controlled those mediums, you controlled everything.

And, you know, it enables you to pull these global skills. Gail Kahn's like the Warney Rock or, you know, you can convince the entire world that 2008 was because of, you know, some prime mortgage market or you can run with whatever narrative that you want to. And I think that's increasingly, you know, and I think the coup to gras on all of it, right, the kind of final, the final, the last Bernasian move that will ever be made as a prediction in his style and his manner of doing things was COVID. The COVID pandemic, the slogans, the consensus, the engineering of consent, the manipulation, the limiting of people's paradigms, and their ability to consume information.

that used all of the Bernays playbook. And I think this country is just done. A hundred straight years of being propagandized for everything, for every foreign war. And I think the people, I mean, we've just had enough. And the liberals, like, they're never, they're really not getting it. They're not understanding it because they don't have the same critical perspective on it. They've been the beneficiary of the Bernays techniques for a hundred years.

I mean, and it's, you know, to disprove anyone who might have a notion to the contrary, starting out in 1919, Bernays' wife was a progressive, the first woman to not change her name on a U.S. passport ever. ever and advocated for ACLU and held a NWCP event below them NACNACNIA and Dixon Line and the women's

non-partisan committee for intervention, you know, joining the League of Nations. So it's a progressive tool and operation and mechanism for a hundred years right back to the very beginning. And same thing with the U.S. Information agency.

and it's always been used by this power structure to maintain control from the start to the finish. So like you were saying at the very start, it's not something with, it's not something that began under Obama. It's not something that began with 9-11. Sometimes the left will run with that, the century, the self-documentary. It does a good job in the first episode explaining Bernays, but it veers into like Freudian, ego psychology and a lot of the hippie movement and other stuff. And that's another very different angle. Like people took, it wasn't just Bernays that took Freud and used that to just, well,

I guess if Stormy's listening, I think to get demons to possess people to make them do things like join cults and release subconscious forces as some. kind of healing mechanism. You know, when you have that power over somebody, it's a complete intoxication. And another evil thing, I think, is he was so frequently in his lifetime saying that we need total one-world governance, or we need to make the world safe for democracy or that it's enlightening people. He's speaking with such certainty as this positive thing is he's destroying the world, really. I just, this is liberalism's legacy. Another little point I'd like to make is that Nazi propaganda ended at Nuremberg.

Communist propaganda ended when the wall fell in 91 or so. And later on then. Liberalism's propaganda never fell. This is something people forget. There's not a moment in time, really up until January of this year, where the propaganda tactics and the establishment and the regime's self-perception and its mechanism in the Bernays style was ever under real serious scrutiny or dismantling. every single president from 1920 to 2020 upheld this tactic of things,

this public relations attitude. It was on every, the Nielsen readings in every television system in America relied upon this, that you could just focus, group your way into getting people to consume information in the manner that you like. and it's why also the regime in a bigger sense continues to rely on more conventional legacy media news organizations like CNN, MSNBC, late night shows. These were the mediums that they dominated ever from like ever since like the 60s and 70s for 50 straight years. This was their mechanism that they could use to control and sway public opinion. and when you use a mechanism continuously for generations, I'm reminded of another thing Stormy said,

because he has a lot of great insights. The people that grow up now, they don't understand the original intention of this system or tactic. They only know how to move the lever a little bit and to manipulate factors and dynamics in it, just a twitch, but they don't really know why it's in place. Right?

kind of have heard the slogan, well, we're going to use public relations to better our democracy. And, you know, for Bernays and his ilk, that meant something very specific, that you're trying to move towards

a specific way of consumption and a specific way of having people relate to science and technology and the productive factors behind their consumer goods and also their politics. It was a very specific laid-out established relationship. The other thing to consider is that people, when this propaganda was in its early 50 years or so, why wouldn't you trust the, what was it? It sounds very quaint now because we're very cynical and hip to this.

But if something comes up and says, well, what was it? The tobacco thing. Uh, to do. If something says it's like the tobacco safety health commission or something, people believed that. That people really thought that when, you know, a scientist or a doctor was putting out their seal of approval on a, on a consumable good that it meant something. thing. People, when they saw that cotton seed oil was safe for consumption and radium products

were safe to use in your home, well, fuck it. You know, you use it and then you develop cancer because of it. And another thing about Bernays is that he also advocated for prescription drugs and the same consensus building, so to speak, mechanism in the sale of drugs. So that's why in this country, you see ads for boner medications on TV because Edward Bernays wants you to be a well-informed to consumer. And all these different prescription medications then lead to just, but it's not consensus that it leads to. You know, the last thing I'll say to bring it up out of the 20th century into the 21st is the society that this was being performed in was like 95% white or something. Or, you know, just overwhelmingly, you know, and if the race isn't your thing,

then it's a stable, homogenous, economically prosperous society in which you can engineer things and tweak variables and expect a relatively predictable result. another reason in addition to the information age that this stuff becomes so unpredictable is that the people conducting the propaganda are not using it for the benefit even of the consumer or the target audience or whatever right they begin instead of being a special pleading of a special interest of one particular group towards a broader generalized audience. The engineering of consent is a self-referential feedback loop, where the special pleading from the special group will be for itself.

It'll mark it to itself and forget the need to appeal to a broader generalized audience. I think this is the explaining factor as to why progressive propaganda, I think generally beginning in the Obama administration, failed to appeal to the right, not just because the right grew wiser to it, but because the left forgot how to speak to a generalized audience. They forgot that they had to engineer the consent, and they just thought that they already had the consent. I think distributist said this on his latest appearance, that the left forgot how to, the left forgot to speak to anyone outside of its own echo chamber. And losing that was losing their greatest possible strength. To say the Brené's quote again, like, you need to engineer consent to get racial and religious tolerance,

to vote a new dealer into office or to organize a consumer's buying strike. So you need to engineer the result that you want. You can't just expect it to happen because you put propaganda into effect. When people simplify Bernays's method into propaganda, that's something as simple as a poster, but Bernays's propaganda was not just putting a single piece of media out there. It was a whole, it is, really, a whole system of controlling every aspect So, like, you know, to give a very fast example, you walk into your local grocery store and you want to get a jar of pickles.

You don't know which pickle to choose. Well, okay, you can pull up in your local, you can pull up on your local coupons and see which one is the cheapest. You can make an informed decision by looking at the ingredients list. And you can talk to a cashier and who knows the stock. knows what goes quickly, right? That actually is an informed consumer of a product who will go and do that. That is your hippie mom. These are your home birth anti-vax types.

These are people that are really behind the RFK types, I think, are people that truly want to be informed Americans in the more classic pre-20th century definition of the word when that was the style of advertising that was conducted, that a product was sold on its merits to the consumer. If you want to buy that same jar of pickles in sicko Bernay's world, you get some stupid ad on YouTube and you are propagandized by the pickle jar itself, telling you that a scientist says that it has, I don't know, I'm mixing examples, but like lower cholesterol, arterials have lower cholesterol according to scientists. and that anybody with some sense realizes that a lot of those things are faked anyway

and that it's put on your TV in fakeness and it's put on your computer screen by fakeness and when you see it in the store you're not perceiving your product that you're about to purchase as an informed consumer but you're seeing like the mechanism the manufactured consent right in front of you and a product that you consume, and it makes you, I mean, I don't say this in disparaging way, it makes you a mindless consumer instead of a conform, informed consumer.

And we've also lost status symbols in this system, because part of Bernays's success in advertising products was he would determine fashion trends, product placement in movie and TV shows is directly, I mean, Bernays in the 1920s and 30s would do product placement and he would choose specific celebrities he had total control over media production in order to do this and nowadays there's not this cultural mass man ecosystem where you are in your mass urban society and you're talking with all of your friends, and the consensus has been established among your friends

because your friends have consumed the same media, and that you have all seen the science or the authoritative reports or that you've read the local newspaper articles, which I'll tell you that this product is a good idea. It's not this centralized manipulation. People live these atomized, decentralized lives. So even the style in which Bernays relies upon the mass man can't be replicated anymore. People are no longer these large, homogenized blocks that have stable associations and live in one place for their whole lives.

and we now live in a world of great transience and the manipulation just adds so much insult to injury. I think it's long overdue for Trump, anyone, I mean, anyone to go through and question all this stuff, the left after the 1990s totally ceded their ground to criticize capitalism at all, right? They gave up the ghost and occupied Wall Street, 2011, in my lifetime as a adult. And since that point, you know, in 2011, it's 14 years ago, the consumption element, the consumer element, the protesting of this Bernasian system, like the left has gone the opposite direction. They've been totally in bed with corporations and the manipulation. and benefiting from the system

and any real, I wouldn't call it an anti-corporate, but any anti-consumption or anti-manipulation or anti-propaganda perspective or credibility that the left ever had was just completely lost. One of the last thing about Bernays, people might wonder about his partisan leanings.

Definitely he was, but whenever he would write PR articles, one of them from the mid-1940s, says that we need to very closely manage perception and I think it was wages and consumer options so that we don't get too radical of a response from either the right or the left, right? That we just kind of get this frozen stasis. Let's see. I'm kind of all over the place there.

Any thoughts, Pete? No, I think what you've... stated in the last, uh, this last section here is, uh, perfect to end on. Yeah,

there's really not, I mean, we could keep talking about this all night and, uh, I think the points you've made already are, uh, are perfect and we'll give people a lot to think about. There's enough information on him out there.

And plus the books are easier to read. I mean, you can pick up propaganda. You can pick up crystallizing. You read both of those books. Um, you, in a couple days.

If you, if you're someone who doesn't have a lot of time to read, you can still get through him in a few days. And there's video, like I said, there's video out there, you can hear the man talk, and that'll give you a good sense of him as well. Yeah, absolutely. The Adam Curtis documentary on him, but most of the research, if it wasn't the physical books,

I was using archive.org. You can find all of his stuff. There are all the interviews with him. it's all straight out of the horse's mouth. Like none of what I was saying was really hyperbole. Like this is all explicitly stuff that he's stated in interviews or books, which makes it all the more evil. Yeah.

All right. Well, uh, let's wrap this up. Yes, sir. Promote your, uh, promote your, uh,

YouTube channel that's in stasis. Yeah, I just, I've deserved that one. Uh, Philo Smith-Selani, you can find me on YouTube. I will put out,

more content i swear and don't don't ask don't ask for social media he's not on social media he's a smart one yeah i do my best to anonymize myself uh yeah thank you for having me on i really i really appreciate it and uh i hope to bring more light to these forgotten not so forgotten figures soon well you know i would i tease you about the youtube channel but you do tons of research before you come on the show and you um i appreciate you putting your time into that um so they'd, you know, so you can come here and educate on, you know, some figures that people don't know about. I think this was a great little, like, three great episodes in a row covering Bernard Baruch, James Forrestall, and, and Mr. Bernays, because he, this is, I mean,

it's just, studying those three is just a picture of the 20th century. Yeah, and the world we live in now, I think, is totally incoherent without understanding the 20th century. Well, hopefully we're on the path to destroying the 20th century and leaving it behind. Something, anything new. All right, Phyllis. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate it, Pete.