that the portal to the darkness of america for me was woodrow wilson. i hate this guy. woodrow wilson would answer that no. he wasn t alone. he had a whole team of people around him. and we have never untangled ourselves from this thinking since. tonight, we are going to spend a little time with edward bernais and marvin alasky. he was a guy who was a communist and he saw the light and he went, holy cow! no, that s not the answer. that s not the answer. he actually found that while he was over in russia. you will meet him tonight. but history continues to repeat over and over and over again. back around the turn of the century, during world war i when woodrow wilson was in the office here, the progressives, they were called the fabian
here s the system we work under now and here s where edward bernais had a tremendous effect on the public relations propagand a. right now, you have the idea that people cannot in fact rule themselves. this that, li will do drawings here. here s a person and he s frowning. he s very unhappy. here are other people. and in fact, they are screaming. what isn t sky s falling. we can t do anything. help us, it s arnan emergency! we must do something right away. i could draw more people. but you would tell me don t give up your day job and so forth. there is chaos, in other words. but oh, happy day. we have and this is what edward bernais, the founder of public relations called a human god. bernais was an atheist, he believes there is no god, no providence, no one to help us, we have to invent human gods. we have to pledge our allegiance
what is the system? marvin olack ofy is the editor in chief of world magazine. he interviewed edward bernais in 1994. jim wallace is a former communist who has seen it from the inside and has a unique take on it. let me go to fern from new york city. how are you? good, thanks. good. my question is where are you seeing the greatest influence today of bernais teaching? where is his greatest influence? i think cat sunstein. it s very strange. bernais is not necessarily a bad man and i don t know if any of these guys are bad men, they just believe you are stupid. and that s not what the founders so his greatest influence was in media. i mean, everybody everybody used him. you were at his house. sure. you brought anything up, what
franklin. the hospitals were largely created by christians. that s where it started. the idea was to empower individuals in their communities. groups of people, church groups, civic group, other groups, to empower them to develop projects to help and get government out of the way. that was the idea of compassionate conservative. that s why it wasn t compassionate lipliberallism. you met with bernais. uh-huh. he was in his 90s. you also have met with jim wallace. sure. you speak the same language. he s a marxist. you are a former marxist. the early progressives went right into the churches. and he s a guy who says, i m a hater, et cetera, et cetera and jesus the gospel is about marksism marxism, absolutely
to them. when you listen to this, george soros who, has said, i m like a human god. i m a god. i m experimenting. but the human gods are not necessarily the brightest people around. they are not necessarily the people who really understand to do. they may be very good-looking people. they may be athletic people. they may be stars in a lot of ways, but they are not the one who is are really deciding how we should live, what we should do. this is edward bernais. above the human gods, you basically have manipulators. have you bernais himself, who, as we will talk about, was involved in a whole lot of things to change how people lived, how people ate, who you voted for. this is the one who is say a little bit of homer simpson exists in everybody and we can manipulator them. or bernais said, it might be