Tonight, I want to talk to you about science. I want to talk to you about the pinheads that think that they are better than you. President Obama has recruited a bunch of behavioral scientists, yes, a behavioral insights team. This should scare the living bat snot out of every American. We’re not for propaganda, right?
Are we for the kind of stuff that Goebbels was using? Because that’s what he did. He figured out if I put enough images of rats in front of people, and I say “Jew” every time you see a rat, will they start thinking that those rats are vermin? Yes, as it turns out, yes. And so we’ve always had this understanding in America, we don’t do propaganda. We’ve always been against it.
And to have some creepy behavioral scientists standing around in lab coats looking at the American public as rats, that’s a problem – at least it used to be. What they try to do is to suddenly influence your behavior, to make the government more efficient – that’s what the president says – no, to get you to do what the government wants you to do.
Behavioral science, it’s a key weapon. The president used it. In fact, he used a “consortium of behavioral scientists.” Oh, he did that during the 2008 election, and then he used it again in 2012, and nobody said anything about it, scientists looking at you like a lab rat. Cass Sunstein, this is one of the big problems I have with him. He is the behavioral science mastermind. He wrote about it and how it can be tested on the public in his book Nudge.
This is critical for people to understand. Progressives are not progressed. They’re not enlightened. They are early 20th century thinkers. They view themselves as superior to the rest of society. They think they know what’s best for you, what’s best for society, eat more carrots, drive hybrids, support the overthrow of regimes they don’t like, Libya, Syria. Oh, wait a minute. Libya and Syria, that’s the Progressives in the Democratic Party –
oh no, and also the Republican Party.
The secret is they always try to win people over with public debate. Wilson did it. FDR did it. This president has done it. And when they can’t win you over with debate, not because, you know, their solution is stupid, but because they honestly believe the American people are too stupid, they have to find another way to get people to behave the way they feel you should be behaving. That’s where behavioral science comes into play.
Now, I guess the ultimate behavioral scientists some people would say would be God and our churches, because that’s what used to control our behavior. But now you can’t leave your church because your church is the federal government. God is in Washington. And instead of preaching to you and telling you you should choose or you’re going to go to hell, what they have is choice architecture, where they remove all of the bad choices and leave people with only the good choices.
They argue that people are still free to make choices – you know, you can eat the flag, you can eat grass, or you could have a banana. You still have a choice. Which one do you want? They’ve trapped you in a box. Nobody’s going to eat this. Nobody I know…well, actually I do know some hippies out in California that blend this up and drink it. Anybody sane is eating this out of this choice architecture.
That’s how behavioral science works. It’s based in manipulation, coercion, and control. All of these attributes are distinctly un-American, but they are the cornerstone of the progressive ideology. Don’t take my word for it. Look it up.
This manipulation goes all the way back to the progressive pioneer Edward Bernays. This is the guy who really started selling soap. He was dubbed “the father of spin.” He was the master of swaying public opinion. We’ve talked about him several times. He changed how Americans ate breakfast. We used to have, I believe, coffee and a piece of toast. After Bernays, it was ham and eggs. That’s what it was for breakfast.
He made the cigarette sexy. He’s the one that got everybody smoking cigarettes in movies. One of Bernays’ greatest manipulations was his work, believe it or not, with bananas, the United Fruit Company. Based in Guatemala, the United Fruit Company gained incredible power because we started eating bananas.
The United States started importing bananas in the late 1800s, and the United Fruit Company dominated much of the country and portions of almost a dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere due to the power and control of corrupt dictators. And what would happen is these bad dictators would just give the United Fruit Company massive swaths of land as gifts, and then the United Fruit Company kind of like GE, what GE does today, just does whatever the dictator wants.
Unfortunately, the power for the United Fruit Company was challenged in the 1950s, and Guatemala elected a president who promised to take on the fruit producer and reduce their power through land reforms. Now this threatened these guys, and they turned to an army, an army of one, Edward Bernays.
VIDEOUnited Fruit brings in Bernays, and he basically understood that what United Fruit Company had to do was change this from being a popularly elected government that was doing some things that were good for the people there into to this being very close to the American shore, a threat to American democracy, that it being at a time in the Cold War when Americans responded to issues of the Red Scare and what Communism might do.
He was trying to transform this and brilliantly did transform it into an issue of a communist threat very close to our shores, taking United Fruit again as a commercial client out of the picture and making it look like a question of American democracy, American values being threatened. “The Century of the Self,” British Broadcasting Corporation.
Okay, was that right or wrong? Almost every American would say that’s wrong, tell the truth. Bernays unleashed a propaganda war of epic proportions. He sent reporters to Guatemala on fact-finding missions. He set out to paint the new president as a Communist, even though he wasn’t a Communist. Bernays played on the fears of the American public because he had bananas to sell. He even created a fake news agency.
VIDEOHe also created a fake independent news agency in America called the Middle American Information Bureau. It bombarded the American media with press releases saying that Moscow was planning to use Guatemala as a beachhead to attack America. “The Century of the Self,” British Broadcasting Corporation
Okay, not true. Suddenly the news reports started hitting major American media. “Articles began appearing in the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, Time, Newsweek, the New Leader and other publications, all discussing the growing influence of Guatemala’s Communists.” Really?
He also tried to soften the company’s image. This is what he did, Senorita Chiquita banana – I’m a Chiquita banana, and I’m here to say. Bernays wasn’t interested in conducting merely a PR war. He was also conducting an actual war, a revolution. Bernays was working to forge a new network of intelligence agents in Central America expressly to discredit the regime. It led to a successful coup d’état which was engineered by the U.S. government and the CIA.
You want to know why there are so many Communists down in Central America that hate our guts? Because of Edward Bernays. Here’s an example of the media barrage and the U.S. engaging. Look at this 1950s newsreel.
VIDEOOn the Guatemala-Honduras border, the town of Nueva Ocotepeque, headquarters of the Guatemala insurgents, is invaded by a planeload of American newsmen, including Al Waldren, Movietone veteran war photographer. Here to bring the world reliable newsreel reports from this latest global hotspot, his camera catches a press interview with secondary anti-Communist liberation leaders, Captain Menbieto and Colonel Lopez, who with maps explain how they hope to capture the capital city. Massing for an advance against the Communist dominated forces of Pres. Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, the liberation patriots are well equipped with small arms.
Believe it or not, this is why people hate, they hate Capitalism too, because all for the sale of the banana. Many believe the anti-American protests were staged and orchestrated by Bernays himself. Bernays had masterfully created an entirely different and alternate universe.
VIDEOHe totally understood that the coup would happen when the public and the press when conditions in the public and the press allowed for a coup to happen, and he created those conditions. He was totally savvy in terms of just what he was helping create there in terms of this overthrow. But ultimately he was reshaping reality, reshaping public opinion in a way that’s undemocratic and manipulative. “The Century of the Self,” British Broadcasting Corporation
I will tell you that that’s exactly what happened again in Egypt and Libya. Now, after this coup, Guatemala went back to an oppressive dictatorship controlled by the banana people. In fact, it is this story where the term “banana republic” was born. Over the next 40 years, four decades, 200,000 in Guatemala alone were killed in guerrilla attacks, government crackdowns, civil wars all across Latin America, just so he could protect the banana people, perpetual revolution.
Oh, and one other thing about this revolution, as always, there are unintended consequences. At the time, there was this young Argentine leftist. He was an activist. He happened to be in Guatemala during this particular coup staged by Edward Bernays. He was a supporter of the president. And after the coup, he became so angry that he actually said it’s time for a revolution, and he became a revolutionary himself. His name, Che.
Che concluded that the Guatemalan coup was successful because the president just didn’t kill enough people. And during his violent time in Cuba, he made sure that same mistake wasn’t made again, personally ordering the execution of hundreds of political opponents and executing many of them himself. Enjoy your Chiquita banana
SAUL LOEB / Contributor | Getty Images