#bernays

BY JOHN DILILLO

NOV. 11, 2021

"Method acting is a Hollywood tradition that’s netted many an Oscar and irritated thousands of coworkers, but it’s likely never been this stinky before. For The Power of the Dog, the new Netflix psychological-thriller-meets-cowboy-romance, Benedict Cumberbatch joins the unwashed ranks of celebrities like Jake Gyllenhaal and Ashton Kutcher. To stay fully in character, the actor didn’t shower for six days.

It was a choice wholly encouraged by Oscar-winning director and writer Jane Campion.."

YOU DONE FUCKED UP, CIA, AND SCIENTOLOGY CONNECTED, GEORGE CLOONEY .

"The Clooney family connections to Washington and politics at the highest level is nothing new. Fun fact, his maternal great-great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Ann Sparrow, was the half-sister of Nancy Lincoln, mother of, you guessed it, Abraham Lincoln.

Not only is Clooney related to Washington royalty, he’s not the first person in his family to make it big in entertainment.

Cabaret singer and actress Rosemary Clooney was George Clooney’s aunt, the sister of his father Nick Clooney. George’s other aunt, Betty Clooney, was also a famous singer in the 1950’s. And yet another famous singer, “You Light Up My Life” singer Debby Boone, is George’s cousin. Recall that his father was a gameshow and TV host and it almost starts to seem as if being from certain families makes it a lot easier to break into Hollywood.

Clooney was raised a strict Roman Catholic and attended Catholic schools where he served as an altar boy from the time he was young. By middle school Clooney had developed Bell’s Palsy, a type of facial paralysis. Bell’s Palsy is rare in adolescents, as it’s most commonly linked to sexually transmitted herpes and extreme stress. It’s worth noting that Clooney’s fellow United Nations and Council on Foreign Relations pal Angelia Jolie has also long struggled with Bell’s Palsy. In Clooney’s case, what with the rampant systemic child sex abuse we are learning has gone on for decades in the Catholic church and the connection between Hollywood, child sex abuse and Hollywood-linked military programs such as MK Ultra (recall Clooney’s father’s military ties), his having Bell’s Palsy as a child is certainly an interesting side note....Clooney studied acting with leading Scientologist Milton Katselas at his Beverly Hills Playhouse for 5 years, from 1982-1987.

In the book co-authored by the now-deceased-under-extremely-mysterious-circumstances Andrew Breitbart, Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon — The Case Against Celebrity, Milton Katselas is discussed at length. As well as Scientology in general and it’s connection to Hollywood.

'Here’s the cliff’s notes: Think of Scientology’s presence in Hollywood as an intelligence dragnet to identify those who will trade compromising secrets for power and influence.'

One of the very top lieutenants of that intelligence operation, for decades, was Milton Katselas.

July 15, 2007, New York Times, ‘The Actualizer’: “Students have left Katselas’s school, the Beverly Hills Playhouse, because of the pressure they felt to join the Church of Scientology… they could not ignore how many of their classmates and teachers were Scientologists … and the assorted weirdness..."

The idea that smoking actually made women freer was completely irrational, but it made them feel more independent. It meant that irrelevant objects could become powerful emotional symbols of how you wanted to be seen by others.

By Durgadas (Rodney) Lingham.(c) Durgadas (Rodney) Lingham. All Rights Reserved.No part of this article may be copied or reproduced in any manner, except via direct permission from the author in writing. Behind the often well-intended interest in all things Indic, we often find traditions in the West grossly distorted, and simply used as a mere marketing tool for egoic adulation.Here, we will…

Even if they're four hours long. Send help.

The AHA had gotten lucky, but it wasn’t dumb luck. It was the brilliance of the man at the helm of the PR firm P&G had retained, Edward Bernays.

Bernays is widely recognized as the de facto inventor of the public relations industry, and he’s probably the twentieth century’s most influential person that most of us learn nothing about. He wielded influence behind the closed doors of the most powerful corporations and political leaders in the world, including at least four presidents, several multinational companies, and the Central Intelligence Agency. He’d begun in advertising, where he revolutionized the industry. Before Bernays, many advertisers tended to tout the practical, rational aspects of their products, things like durability and effectiveness. Bernays taught advertisers to manipulate people’s emotions instead. He’d learned about the power of emotions from an uncle he’d grown up admiring, none other than the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud.

Bernays took Freud’s theories about the inner workings of the individual mind and applied them to groups of individuals, so that those in power, his corporate and government clients, could better control the population. Bernays wondered, “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?”35 For Bernays, gifted with mind-control skills befitting an Orwellian villain, the answer was clearly yes.

It may be impossible to overstate the degree to which Ed Bernays influenced the culture of the twentieth century, for better or worse. In the late 1920s, he’d had a hand in ad campaigns for the American Tobacco Company calling cigarettes “Torches of Freedom.” This equated smoking to an act of emancipation, thus elevating women who smoked from their status as “trashy” while also giving them a sense of power. The Virginia Slims advertisements of the 1970s built its brand concept on Bernays’s initial image of female smokers as modern, liberated women. If your tap water is fluoridated (as it is for nearly three-quarters of the US population36), that’s thanks to Bernays. In the 1940s and 1950s, he worked on behalf of the US Public Health Service to convince the American public that water fluoridation was safe and beneficial to human health. The industry needed some good PR to clean up its image because of where fluoride comes from. One of the most common forms of fluoride added to our water here in the United States is fluorosilicic acid, which is derived from the scrubbing systems of the phosphate fertilizer industry. In other words, chimney soot from industrial plants. Of course, strict regulations ensure it gets cleaned up and rendered safe for consumption.

His influence was not limited to the United States. In the early and mid-twentieth century, Bernays’s work on behalf of the United Fruit Company impacted a vast swath of the political landscape across Central and South America. Bernays used many tools from his kit of public relations techniques to promote the interests of United Fruit. He worked with the CIA and other agencies to create a propaganda campaign portraying the democratically elected president of Guatemala as a communist—and a threat to US interests—which ultimately led to his removal from power. This had a chilling effect on democracy and social justice movements in those countries, as governments were more likely to be overthrown if they pursued policies that were seen as threatening to US business interests.

Bernays not only knew how to manipulate people, he knew how to get people excited about being manipulated, a process he describes in detail in his 1947 book, The Engineering of Consent. The book enumerates a variety of persuasive techniques, including propaganda, advertising, and other forms of mass communication, that he used to create seemingly any desired response from the public. While today we might think differently, he didn’t see any problem with using psychology for these purposes and in fact believed his work was essential and beneficial. He felt it was important for educated elites to control the people he considered uneducated. It was good for commerce, capitalism, and the democratic process itself. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses,” he had written in an earlier book, “is an important element in democratic society.”37 In other words, he and his clients know better about what’s good for us than we do.

One of Bernays’s favorite manipulative techniques involved tapping into the immense psychological power of medical doctors. Doctors were a key instrument for Bernays to choreograph behavior “because a doctor is an authority to most people, regardless of how much he [the doctor] knows, or doesn’t know.”38 Citing his 1993 interview with Bernays (who was 102 at the time), journalist Christopher Bryson wrote, in a book about fluoride, “‘You can get practically any idea accepted,’ Bernays told me, chuckling. ‘If doctors are in favor, the public is willing to accept it.’”39 One of Bernays’s favorite tactics for promoting new ideas and products to the public was to stress a claimed public health benefit. He described its effectiveness as “child’s play.”

By catching Bernays’s attention, the AHA hit the jackpot. Thanks to Bernays, the AHA’s many budgetary concerns evaporated overnight. Certainly, companies had paid individual doctors to endorse products before. But this was a whole other category of relationship. The AHA represented an entire specialty of medical doctors with ambitions to lead the conversation on heart disease. The money would be used for everything the AHA had hoped to accomplish. It was enough to fund both cardiovascular research and nutrition education programs for the public. Dr. Keys and the AHA had unknowingly become the benefactors of more than money. They’d been handed the golden ticket: a proven and winning formula with a track record of phenomenal success.

In one fell swoop, Bernays helped take the AHA “from its unimportance,” as he described it during the 1993 interview, “and made it a large, effective organization.”40 The $1.74 million that the association received because Bernays selected its name from the pile of possible contest beneficiaries rocketed the newly reformed AHA off to a stellar start, converting it from a collection of egotistical cardiologists into a national powerhouse. This infusion of money, worth about $30 million in today’s dollars, provided the AHA with the funds it needed to become the dominant force in cardiovascular research, just as the ambitious expansionists had envisioned. More than just a professional society with a research and education arm, the AHA had joined the ranks of true influencers. Or, as Bernays described it, “those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society [and] constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”41

35. Edward L. Bernays, The Engineering of Consent (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969).

36. “Water Fluoridation Data & Statistics,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reviewed June 9, 2023, www.cdc.gov/fluoridation/statistics/index.htm.

37. Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing, 2005).

38. Christopher Bryson, The Fluoride Deception (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 159.

39. Bryson, Fluoride Deception, 159.

40. Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Picador, 2002), 74.