In this interview, Michelle Stiles reviews some of the basic tools of propaganda, which is the topic of her book, “One Idea to Rule Them All: Reverse Engineering American Propaganda.”
It’s a pertinent and apt topic in light of what's been going on over
the last few years, as we attempt to understand how we've been
manipulated and brainwashed.
If you can understand that, then you can prevent it from happening
again in the future, and you can help other people to break free from
the indoctrination as well. Stiles includes the following quote from
George Orwell in the book:
"In the age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
That’s really our battle today, as we fight against a truly
unprecedented disinformation campaign, where the liars are claiming that
everyone else is giving out misinformation, basically turning truth on
its head.
Most of you are aware that I was given top billing on the Center for
Countering Digital Hate’s (CCDH) “disinformation dozen” list, which is a
true testament to the credibility I’ve built over the past 25 years.
They see me as a real threat to their propaganda machine, and it’s no
small honor to be recognized as someone who’s telling the truth in this
age of misinformation.
Legacy Media Was Never Deserving of Our Trust
While propaganda takes many forms, mainstream media play a crucial
role. Many people my age would agree that we used to believe the media
were a trusted source of information. But no more. Investigative
journalism within mainstream media doesn’t exist anymore. They’re all
just talking heads, reading from scripts, which is why they all sound
the same, even reiterating the same sentences verbatim.
The good news is that people are
starting to catch on, and trust in mainstream media has dropped to an
all-time low. In her book, Stiles presents the historical view of media,
and how it’s changed over time. By the early 1900s — literally a
century ago — journalists like Upton Sinclair and George Seldes were
discussing the corruption of the media, how they were owned by big
business with a profit agenda, and how they were not dealing squarely
with investigative reporters.
“They were trying to tell as many people as they could, but they couldn't get it out there,” Stiles says. “And
then, journalists, they were created through the schools. We had to
have a degree to get into it. So now you're sort of captive. You can't
really blow the whistle without blowing up your career. So that impacts
it because nobody can tell the truth. And if you do come out, it's a
long road to getting your own reputation set up and your own income.
I'm just hoping that people, when they take that
perspective, can go, ‘Wait a minute, why would we ever have trusted
them?’ It's a sacred trust, as Lippmann says. ‘The power to determine
what's important and what is not important is a power that is so great
that no one has seen it since the Pope lost his hold on the secular
mind.’
I mean, it's an amazing tool. It's a search light.
It's focusing in on what's important, and it's shielding out what's
deemed not important. One of the things that I bring up in the book is
what I call tribal elders. Because what they are doing is they're
alerting the community. They're magnifying problems and they're smoke
screening things that are not problems.
But the important point to remember is that if you're
magnifying the wrong problems, then you're really harming society.
Tribal elders were meant to help people learn and understand what was
going to be a threat, and then they would counsel together, and they
would execute a plan. So, when you have, in a sense, treasonous tribal
elders, you really have a poison in the society.”
Stiles’ Journey
Stiles’ first foray into propaganda came in the wake of 9/11.
Initially, she didn’t believe that 9/11 was a false flag operation. “I
actually said to somebody, ‘Nobody credible believes that, so stop.’”
But later, she ended up watching a video made by Architects &
Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and it turned out to be a life-altering
decision.
“I remember I really couldn't sleep that night,” she says. “It was about having those trusts torn down, and it's really a betrayal, in a large sense.
I think that's why so many people have a hard time
with coronavirus ... The things we trust [include] authority,
experience, what other people are doing and saying around us, the
culture, the words that we use to describe the culture ... One of the
points that I make in the book is that these guys ... have infiltrated
these trusts.
That's the way to get package propaganda through in a
democracy. I watched your interview with Dr. Marik and he said the same
thing. He said, ‘I had a hard time coming to grips with, ‘Wow, there's a
lot of deception even in my own industry that I haven't really even
seen.’
And I think ... what we're struggling against [is]
that percentage of people who may see the news as untrustworthy, but
they don't see the whole thing, in a sense, they don't see the massive
corruption that's there to support that [corruption].”
Tools of the Propaganda Trade
For propaganda to be effective, there needs to be central
coordination of narratives, and that’s where public relations agencies
come in. I think hardly anyone really appreciates the power that these
companies have.
For example, in the 1950s, the tobacco industry hired the PR company
Hills+Knowlton (H+K). It devised the tobacco industry’s now-infamous
playbook, which worked for almost 50 years. Classic propaganda
strategies included confusing people about the facts, discrediting the
opposition and sowing doubt.
H+K was also responsible for creating the Kuwaiti witness during the
Iraq war. During a hearing, H+K presented an anonymous girl who
testified that Iraqi soldiers were taking babies out of incubators in
the hospital and throwing them onto the freezing floor. Eventually, it
was revealed that she was the daughter of a Kuwaiti ambassador and the
entire story was made up. It was a PR stunt designed to create outrage
and support for the war effort in Iraq, and it worked.
Today, two-thirds to 80% of the content broadcast and published by
corporate media comes from public relations firms, the top four being
the Publicis Groupe, WPP (which recently acquired H+K), Omnicom and
Interpublic.
In other words, most so-called mainstream media “news” is actually
brainwashing propaganda. And, remarkably, when you add the 2022 revenues
of these top four ad holding companies together, it’s still below $60
billion, which is a rather modest price to control international policy
and up to 80% of the global mainstream media landscape.
How PR Companies Are Used in Politics
One of the most classic stories Stiles could find while researching
her book was that of Edward Bernays discussing the use of PR in
politics. Bernays, widely considered the father of public relations and
propaganda, rose to prominence in the 1920s.
Facts and reason were “out,” he said. Instead, if a politician wanted
to advocate for lowering the tariff on wool, for example, he was to
hire a PR company to create the necessary circumstances to make lowering
tariffs the solution to an apparent problem. Stiles tells the story:
“The PR guy is going to talk to prominent businessmen
and get them to agree to wear cotton suits to their important events as
a protest. They're going to boycott wool. Somewhere else in the
community, or in the nation at large, they're going to get some
middle-class people to protest, so they don't seem linked together in
the public's mind.
And then somewhere else, social workers will do some
surveys and interview the poor, and they'll run a report on the plight
of the poor and the suffering that entails from the high cost of wool,
like they can't buy wool blankets and they're freezing to death.
So, you have these events being placed into the
public consciousness, and that's when the politicians are going to step
in and help solve the problem. So, he's teaching young PR professionals
and he says, ‘You're going to have to look and find out, intimately,
what news feels like because you're going to create it.’
Propaganda packaged as news is devastating to a
democracy. They're seeding the consciousness with the problems — and
again, the news is highlighting those ... You might think, well, what
does it matter if a politician advocates for lower taxes?
But let's say that powerful interests have overseas
stakes in wool that they want to dump cheaply onto the United States, or
they want to take out their competitors in the United States with cheap
wool.
Now you have something really nefarious. You have
powerful interests, big government, corporations, and the news
manipulating to consolidate power, wealth and resources ... and they’ve
used this playbook over and over for the last 100 years.”
Things Are Often Not What They Seem
Another common PR tool is public protests. Many events presented as
spontaneous public uprisings aren’t that at all. They’re made up by
people hired by the PR agency to protest, and the media will of course
be sent there to cover it.
Some of these events can be pathetically small, consisting of just a
few dozen protesters, yet they’ll get massive media coverage. In
contrast, real, legitimate public protests can have hundreds of
thousands of people present and get virtually no media coverage at all.
That’s one way to start telling them apart.
Of course, video has become one of the greatest tools of the
propaganda trade. As noted by stiles, “seeing is believing.” It’s easily
to manipulate how an event comes across on video, so we need to
recognize the potential dangers of a visual experience. Since most
newsworthy events don’t happen in our immediate vicinity, we rarely can
verify the veracity of what we see on video.
Infrastructure Belief and Trust
What Stiles refers to as “infrastructure belief” include:
1. Experience — Seeing is believing. Trusting your eyes
2. Authority — Trusting the experts
3. Social pressure — Trusting what other people are doing and saying
4. Culture — Trusting the culture and the words people use to talk about the culture
As explained by Stiles:
“In a small local community that works great. But
when you overlay a technological culture, you can't ferret out those
trusts. [Yet] that's what you're relying on. Because we can't go and
investigate everything. We can't dig up every fact. We have to trust the
medicine man as an authority. So those things are really important to
realize.
Let me give you an example with coronavirus. We saw
what happened visually. People arriving on the ground in China, hazmat
suits, the draconian lockdown. Then we went to Italy and you saw gurneys
and morgues. Then you went to New York City and saw floating ships and
more deaths.
And then somebody died that you knew, or somebody
that you know had somebody lose somebody to coronavirus. And boy, how
could that be wrong? ‘I'm seeing it in my own life. I've experienced it.
It's happening all across the globe. That's got to be real.’
Into that comes the authorities. Grandfatherly Dr.
Fauci, grandmotherly Dr. Birx, the CDC and the WHO. If you didn't trust
them, you might have just trusted science, which is a good thing to
trust in a society of integrity. And if you didn't trust that, then
maybe you trusted Trump ... So now you've got two points of
triangulation.
And then, while everybody seems to be following
along, I'm looking around to see my neighbors. Are they doing it and
saying the same thing? Are they believing the same thing as I am? Okay,
everybody starts wearing masks and all of a sudden you have this huge
triangulation.
You’re looking around in the community, trusting your
eyes, trusting authorities and looking at the social response. And
you're going, ‘Well, this has got to be real.’
So when you and I come up and say, ‘Hey, did you know
that Pfizer only lowered mild symptoms in relatively healthy people?’ —
you would bring facts to them — they would go, ‘You're nuts because
I've triangulated these trusts and you've got to be loony.’
Even in families, it tore apart husbands and wives
who are at odds over this. So, I say in the book that facts are tiny
hand maidens to the true queens of belief, which I believe are these
trusts.
And now you say, ‘Well, how does language impact
that?’ Well, you chronicled in your newsletter that the WHO changed the
definition of pandemic ... of vaccine [and] cases. Never in the history
of medicine has an asymptomatic been considered a case. I test positive
for TB, but I'm not a case, I don't have active TB.
Deaths were also conflated ... So the effect of those
definition changes magnified the threat of the whole thing. And then,
finally, you go to culture. How did that impact? Well, I think they used
our Judeo-Christian ethos of ‘do unto others.’
Don't go to somebody else's house and bring a virus
that may kill their grandmother and I won't do it to you. Especially
because the outcome is something so severe. It's not like you're giving
somebody a cold. You're possibly killing them.
And so that was a slam dunk. You put all those five
pieces together and people were overwhelmed. I was told I was seriously
misinformed and morally reprehensible because I took the stance that I
did. And I'm sure you, as well, got flack. So, that's [why] manipulating
and hacking those trusts is a really big thing.”
Front Groups
Yet another propaganda tool is the creation and use of front groups
that typically pretend to be some sort of independent movement but are
anything but. Front groups are paid and supported by industry and exist
to justify some nefarious aspect of that industry.
Few people have the time to take a deep dive into how these front
groups came about. There are loads of them, and they almost always use
some benevolent public service name so you sound like a heartless fool
for criticizing them. As noted by Stiles:
“They were using those techniques really, really
early on ... It’s a huge problem. If we just made front groups illegal
and eliminated PR firms, boy, we'd be way forward to advancing the truth
in the country, wouldn't we?”
The Threat of Large Language Models
Of course, most industries are incredibly well-connected politically,
and would likely find some other workaround, even if front groups were
banned. One such workaround, which is already being deployed, is these
large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. There
are dozens, if not hundreds of other companies that are also working on
similar products around the world, including the giant search engine
Baidu in China.
I'm convinced, and I've studied this carefully, that these are the
harbingers of artificial general intelligence, (AGI). It's not quite
there yet, but we are really close. I'm talking about this decade. In my
mind, it's inevitable. This also seems to be the consensus from the
number of experts that I reviewed.
This is a major concern because, as explained in Stiles’ book,
language is what they use to convince us that something is true when
it’s not.
What better propaganda tool could you invent than an artificial
intelligence that has access to just about everything that's ever been
written, and that can carefully orchestrate and carry out a detailed
plan to indoctrinate the entire world with falsehoods. Already, these
large language models are being deployed in Media Literacy education.
“I agree with you,” Stiles says. “I think
it's phenomenally dangerous. [Media Literacy] is actually a propaganda
campaign. So you take J-6 and you say, ‘Well, these people were
influenced by disinformation and it caused an insurrection, so
disinformation is a threat to society.’ Then you go to the legal
legislative realm and you say, ‘Look, we've got to do something about
this. Disinformation is a threat to democracy.’
So, they have these euphemistically labeled bills
called Media Literacy. They've just passed the first one, but there's a
whole slew of them that are scheduled. If you go to Daily Clout1
by Naomi Wolf, you can find they're all set up to go in many different
states, basically teaching K-12 ‘media literacy.’ I mean, what are you
going to teach a kindergartner about media literacy that isn't just
blatant indoctrination? They're before the age of reason.”
The point is that they're using this indoctrination tool on you right
now, today. And it's going to get worse and worse over time. There are
some things we can do, but it’s important to realize that this is
probably one of the biggest propaganda threats we face.
It’s also our biggest existential threat, because these AI-equipped
large language models have been given the ability to code. They can
recursively create software and run that software, and continue to
improve it at an exponential rate. So it seems inevitable and only a
matter of time before they start improving the code to achieve
superintelligence capacity that is an existential threat to humanity.
Lex Fridman recently interviewed Max Tegmark2
who is an AI scientist at MIT and has been very concerned about the
dangers of AI. He is the primary author of the recent letter signed by
1800 scientists, including Elon Musk,3 recommending a six-month stop of development to integrate safety back into the equation.
His primary concern is that these large language models have been
given access to human psychology, which means they know precisely how to
manipulate and change human behavior. Additionally, they now have
access to the internet, as discussed by a previous Lex guest, Eliezer
Yudkowsky.4
So, the combination of recursively improving their code, having
access to the internet and understanding human psychology provides what
appears to be the largest existential threat to humanity. In my view
it’s even more than the global cabal, which will likely be using these
tools which have a very high probability of backfiring on them.
Unplug, Disconnect and Take Back Your Kids
Part of the solution is to minimize your use of surveillance tools
such as computers, cell phones, social media apps and Google products.
Be aware of how you can be tracked and surveilled through your various
electronic devices. Revert back to analog devices when possible. We also
need to take control of our children’s education.
“You have to take the kids back,” Stiles says. “I
firmly believe you've got to train them on reading and logical
thinking, off the videos. Jacque Ellul published a book called
‘Humiliation of the Word’ in 1970. He so perfectly portrayed what we see
now in the social justice warriors. He said ... ‘What training by video
does is it produces an extreme conviction without logical coherence.’
So you see the social justice warriors throwing
themselves on the steps of the Capitol screaming and crying — these
outward displays of emotion — but if you interview them, they really
can't articulate the problem. So, I was astounded that that 50 years
ago, he said, ‘Don't train through video.’
You can't abandon reading and training your thinking
process and critical thinking skills. I think that's really important
for parents to remember. We have all these video educational materials,
but they've got to read to get the thinking-skill part.”
Become a Smart Sheepe and Build a Truth Movement
Stiles is also working on a new project called “Smart Sheepe” (Old
English plural for “sheep”) to combat the government propaganda machine.
During World War I, George Creel, head of the Committee on Public
Information, recruited and trained 10,000 “Four-Minute Men.” They were
leaders in local communities who would memorize talking points from
Washington and would stand up and recite them during the reel change at
the movies.
“It swayed a lot of people because they were respected in their local communities and people held them in high regard,” Stiles says. “10,000
men he trained. So, my challenge is, if George Creel can mobilize
10,000 men to spout Washington DC talking points on behalf of the war,
let's mobilize 10,000 to protect the sheep, expose the lies and the
frameworks that are used to create them.
Many people don't think they can teach. But can they
lead a discussion group? Can they bring this conversation into the lives
of their children? Can you sit down, take the book, lead a discussion
group and teach the material? You could do that with church, meetups,
book clubs, et cetera. That's kind of the idea — to bring the discussion
back to the people ...
The problem with anyone that gets lifted to
prominence in our movement is that the news media just trains their
focus on that person and attempts to destroy them, as you well know. So
we have to stop waiting for high-profile leaders to do the job, and we
can start by doing something small like this. It does add up.”
To learn more and get involved, visit SmartSheepe.com.
“Don't think of it as teaching,” Stiles says. “Start
a conversation. Anybody can do it. They don't have to be an expert.
They don't have to have read all the books. They just have to agree to
open this information. Let's unpack the idea that America has been
infected with propaganda for the last 100 years. That's a real novel
idea for people.
I'm a big advocate of leaving right and left to the
side. Let's not argue ideology. Let's join hands because part of what
they're doing is dividing us. Let's look at the material together. Let's
face America's history together and make a difference that way. You can
get a study guide from me, so you’re not just out there on your own,
and you can share questions and insights with the group, and just
basically put the message out there.”
Of course, also consider picking up a copy of Stiles’ book, “One Idea to Rule Them All: Reverse Engineering American Propaganda,” to understand how we got to where we are today, where truth and lies have been completely inverted.