 It's interesting as we head into a damnable national political year these these torture sessions We have to endure every four years You know, I'll give you an old quote even an ancient quote to start the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name And of course the political process attempts to do just the opposite it attempts to lie and obfuscate about everything so When we think about why this is and why this happens and why we put up with it every four years we have to think about propaganda Which is really the the lubrication that the state uses to keep us all sort of appeased And and I wanted to start with talking about the man who literally wrote the book Fascinating man, and I'm curious to wonder how many people in this room have heard of Edward Bernays Okay, quite a few hands now some of you may have been at an event in Dallas We had a few years ago and I mentioned him briefly there He's absolutely fascinating character and his personal story is something else But with the reason I pulled this quote out of his book people used to title books a little bit more honestly They didn't have the subtitles that go on and on, you know, you see him in the airport But nonetheless he just called his book propaganda and for many many years that was the term used for advertising Advertising is sort of a 20th century term to make things sound a little better But this quote of his where he talks about an invisible government and the people who really set public opinion I thought this is these foreshadowing what we call the deep state today You know he absolutely foreshadowed it and of course the deep state is not just people within the regulatory state It's also the nexus of people in NGOs and media and academia, etc. But I thought that was such a fascinating quote So there's actually some parallels between Edward Edward Bernays life and Ludwig von Mises Both born in in Austria or Mises. What is now Austria? So Edward Bernays was born in Vienna in 1891 Brilliant man absolutely brilliant man, and you've ever heard the phrase, you know Sometimes the most effective people are the people you've never heard of Well, this guy's one of them So he's born in 1891 in Vienna moves to New York City as a young boy. He proceeds to live live until 1995 an astonishing 103 years and And so his first job as a young man or one of his first jobs when he got in the advertising business was in Working for the Woodrow Wilson administration around the time of World War one So they set up something or welly and sounding called the Committee on Public Information Which you can imagine what that was and so what it was was an attempted gin up support for the war effort Because at the time something like 60% of Americans had at least some degree of German ancestry and going to war with their first cousins Was not necessarily their their number one priority in life. So we needed some support for this So he went to work creating wartime propaganda in the 1910s and after the war was over He actually attended the Paris peace conference and a big takeaway from the Paris peace conference from mr. Bernays was that well, you know, we need we now need to turn to the problems of peace That's what he called it the problems of peace and one of those problems was to disseminate American Propaganda worldwide now, you know talk about American accomplishments And one of the other peculiar Problems of peace is selling stuff Because at the end of the day, he's an ad man. He's an advertising man. That's his job whether he's selling war whether he's selling dish soap so He came up with a with a with an idea For a tobacco company because in the 1910s there was still a stigma attached to women smoking That was viewed as something women who were a little more disreputable women who were harlots might do They shouldn't really smoke cigarettes kind of a dirty male habit. Well, the problem with that is you're only selling cigarettes to half the population Right, that's a big untapped market. This won't do So he made a proposal to the lucky strike cigarette company And they paid him the whopping sum of twenty five thousand dollars at the time to come up with an ad campaign And his idea was to call cigarettes torches of freedom And he went and got his own one of his own employees a Woman named Bertha Hunt. That's a very 1910s name. We don't have too many births anymore Bertha Hunt. So he had her walk out into the March 1929 Easter parade in night in New York City So he had her walk out in this parade and she lit up a cigarette And as she walked through the parade some other women came out also smoking and These were somewhat glamorous women, you know in the in the period and so instantly because this this event was a Big public event in New York City instantly a million of what millions of women around the country heard about this and started Rethinking their thoughts about smoking and as a result Tobacco sales to women rose considerably over the next couple decades. It was actually successful and So what's so interesting about this is that he was learning as he as he went through all this and he said, you know Human customs things that have been long-standing traditions can actually be broken down by using dramatic appeal Having glamorous well-dressed women smoking in a fancy New York City parade was was the use of dramatic appeal And so what he understood and developed was the idea of engineering consent We have to appeal to people's underlying motivations, you know What really gets them on a more visceral level and his understanding of this was something that he crafted and thought about Technically, but there's some people who just get this naturally and we all know what we're talking about in the political sphere here, right? Why does why does Bill Clinton win? Why did Bill Clinton win? Why does AOC resonate with people as Opposed to Elizabeth Warner, Hillary, you know, why why do some people have that emotional touch? Why you know, why does nobody want to vote for John Kasich? Well, it's because he didn't read and understand Edward Bernays. He didn't understand how you engineer consent and So I think we're gonna find out that Edward Bernays his legacy lives on well past his life And he's a fascinating guy. This is a slim volume if any of you have interest in picking up I recommend it if any of you can find this first edition with the Noam Chomsky cover. You might want to hold on to that one So how do you engineer consent? How did how did Edward Bernays and how do our modern political media class go about it? Well George Orwell understood this as well He wrote this fantastic essay in the 1940s called politics in the English language and in this essay Which you should all read is very brief. It's available online. It's just a maybe couple thousand words He talked about the use of meaningless words and by meaningless words He means words that are just used so vaguely That you can craft them in a consciously dishonest way and I love that term consciously dishonest because maybe it's subconsciously dishonest But nonetheless dishonest and he even back then in the 1940s said well, you know word like democracy There's no agreed definition and it's just so vague. We just understand democracy is well That's something good, you know, that's all democracy means you don't have to define it much beyond that So it's it's interesting that democracy is still being used as a meaningless word and George Orwell was an absolute master at language So if you think of Bernays as someone who set the emotional tone for stuff George Orwell was more the craftsman the technician actually using words and understanding how they were used obviously a very fine writer in his own right So what are some of the meaningless words to which we are going to be subjected in 2020? Well, there's some oldies But goodies I mean there's a million of them, but you're going to hear these a lot and one of my least favorite people on earth is Hillary Clinton and She gushes about our sacred democracy and after you know coming back from the restroom I continue reading about this, you know democracy is just such a sham word in our country First of all it never appears in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence by the way a little side note there But you know, what's democracy what you know, we use it a shorthand for legitimate We use it as shorthand for we have consent government has consent of the governed. Do they really? When Ronald Reagan won his reelection in 1984, this is one of the biggest landslides in American history 1984 versus the hapless Walter Mondale Ronald Reagan proceeds to win every state in the country. I think it's saved for Walter Mondale's home state of Minnesota. I think if I'm correct 1984 okay Ronald Reagan got 54 million votes in that election an Absolute epic lides landslide, but here's the kicker. There's in 1984. There were 235 million Americans He got 22% of the country 22% of the country is an epic landslide That equals consent of the governed. I'm not a math major, but not in my book So what's democracy and what's legitimate and what's consent is is Maduro He's democratically elected. So do we support Maduro? What about Vladimir Putin? He's been elected several times actually in the former Soviet Union. Who else should we talk about? There's all kinds of people Was Donald Trump democratically elected? Depends on who you ask. That's the problem with democracy. It's become an absolutely meaningless word But there's a close cousin to democracy that we're gonna hear more and more lately Which is of course social justice because these two concepts are Interrelated if the country's democratic it can be democratic socialist and then we can have social justice and all these exceedingly vague terms That nobody can define Nobody can interpret nobody can provide a definition or a policy or anything else Well, we just need more social justice and of course it sounds good. It sounds like kindness or fairness But when we can't define something what it really means is Distributive justice it means the quality of outcomes not a quality of opportunity That's how people in this country use the term social justice. It is about a distributive result Not just an opportunity or some kind of fairness and of course read the kayak talked about the mirage of social justice He said you know it's it's so It's such a mirage you can't you can't define it so you can't even attack it or support it coherently and he said justice is an attribute of Individual actions how we deal with one another That's justice. That's why the Statue of Liberty has a blindfold for a reason. We're supposed to look at the crime not the person So what social justice really means is treating people unequally it means using state power to treat people unequally So nobody ever says that so therefore it's a meaningless word And of course the only justice that we ought to be caring about as people who believe in political liberty is the purest Procedural form of justice in other words before the institutions of the state Nothing more nothing less. This is about this is not about outcomes justice is not about outcomes per se Another word that we're gonna hear a lot in 2020 where we've been subjected to of course over the last few years with Brexit and Trump is populism populists You know democracy is good, but populism is bad The problem is is that populism for from my perspective anyway, it's just democracy good and hard Right. That's what populism is and or you could say populism is when the wrong person wins a democratic election when the right person wins That's that's our sacred democracy And as an aside I remember as an event with Tom with I was saying you know if just a few hundred thousand more people Actually a few tens of thousands more people in a couple of swing states that voted for Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump some of the states that Trump swung from above just a few tens of thousand people Maybe thirty forty thousand people out of a country of three hundred odd million if they just voted the right way The way we all knew that everyone's gonna vote for Hillary who was inevitable if they just voted the right way You know you know what the pundits would have been saying the day after the election even say oh, you know You know at the end of the day democracy works and the American people were too smart to be conned by this Real estate guy who's so coarse and he's a TV star and every everyone would be talking about how the great wisdom of our system But instead you know ten twenty thirty thousand people vote wrong and all of a sudden we're in an absolute calamity You know what kind of system is that? So populism is not all it's cracked up to be Inequality this one we're going to get talking about who good and hard We're gonna get this one good and hard for the next 12 months and of course it's a mirage What does inequality mean Tom Woods points this out if you make forty thousand dollars and you have the good fortune to live in the West today You're infinitely wealthier than virtually any human being who ever walked the earth You have hot and cold running water at your disposal You have some kind of habitation over your head probably have some kind of vehicle You probably have air conditioning etc So it's awfully hard to say what inequality means And it's awfully hard to make this term or this thought stop at the US border or the border of Western developed countries Why why do we care about inequality only in certain geographic zones? and of course I Always wonder when you're talking to people who say inequality is the great Issue of our day. It's the great problem of the West. They really believe this They think inequality is the great problem of the West and of course in doing so what they care about is Only the number of zeros in your bank account not how you actually live every day and and you know that person who makes forty thousand dollars Provided they work in an office and drive to that office in the car Their day-to-day life is probably more like Bill Gates's life than unlike it Compared to someone two or two or three hundred years ago when there was real inequality in the West But here's the question. Here's the magic question. You have to ask the Inequalists the people who are obsessed with this issue is okay Let's say there was a magic button you could press and by pressing you would immediately make The lowest 10% materially the least affluent 10% of people in America Objectively better off. There's a magic button if you press the button Objectively their health care their housing their food their education will all improve by let's say 10% So a 10% material improvement for the lowest 10% Financially in America, but by pressing the magic button the wealthiest 1% all get 20% wealthier Would you press the button? I sure would I Think most of you care about people in this room would too so this inequality narrative is designed to get us sort of On our heels defending Liberty defending capitalism when we should be attacking and promoting inequality is just a word mostly for more taxes That's what inequality means when people said when someone talks about inequality Get your pay get your checkbook out because that's what's coming next and of course 2020 We are going to be harangued for the next 12 months over climate change Okay, again climate change makes inequality look like a precisely defined term. I Mean we have no idea for so when someone wants to talk to you about climate change and they say are you a climate scientist? Well, most people aren't climate scientists last time I checked so the rest of us should just shut up And we should have a technocratic rule by five climate scientists who don't even agree with one No, that's interesting me But there's there's four questions quickly present themselves that you should ask these people the first one is Okay, do we really know what's happening because we have to look at things over eons over thousands of years We can't just look at them over 50 years or 100 years 200 so is the earth really getting hotter or colder? I don't know over time The second question you have to ask well if it really is getting hotter or colder Is that a problem is that bad because maybe the temperate agricultural zones would just expand a little bit as we got warmer And the sea levels would rise very slowly and we'd adjust or you know I think if you read a lot of people to say getting colder is actually a bad thing because it reduces the temperate Agricultural zones, but I don't know so that's the second question number two is is it good or bad? The question number three is are humans the cause of it Okay, that's a big one In question number four even if one two and three your answer is yes, and humans are the cause of it Are the things you're suggesting are the trade-offs worth it? We're gonna get banned fossil fuels in the next ten years. Okay. I like to drive a car I don't know about the rest of you guys I'm not really into walking everywhere And the idea that we're going to simply get rid of fossil fuels in 10 or 20 years would cause absolute impoverishment of huge swaths of the world and It's interesting that those of us in the West who are further along with you know certain green technologies and solar and all this You know, we're gonna have we're gonna be okay because we're gonna have other things, but it's those poor people in China and Africa Yeah, no fossil fuels guys. Sorry. You don't get to have a Toyota Camry. Mr. African Who came up with that? Well, you know inequality, I guess So we shouldn't get too worried though about the effects of propaganda in the 2020 election if We have some faith in ourselves and in our abilities to sort of see through all of this to see through this fog And mostly it's not just about about lying. It's also about obscuring and obfuscating It's about boosting and promoting certain convenient facts and downplaying or ignoring certain Inconvenient facts. That's that's really how media and the political class does things. They don't always lie They just kind of talk out the sides of their mouths So what can we do about it? That's always the question whenever libertarians or liberty-minded people gather the questions What can we do about it where there's the Fed or war or propaganda or whatever? and It's interesting to me that even at a time when we have more information at our disposal in our fingertips than ever before I mean look at this little deck of cards size thing that basically has all human knowledge on it in my hand Okay But yet we're we almost seem like we know less we have more information and less wisdom than ever before So I'm not sure that the internet alone is going to save our you know younger people from this this absolute Blizzard a propaganda to which we're they're going to be subjected over the next 12 months, but You know it it gives us the ability to fight back that's what this whole deck of cards does is it is a Decentralizing force in our society and some of you are old enough to remember You know you had three networks You had Walter Cronkite after your local news your local news was regimented in ten minute increments Weather sports, etc. And that was it and that was it and you woke up the next day And you got your paper off the driveway and that was it. There was no comment section. There was no pushback Okay, now we've got a comment section now We've got pushback But the first thing each and every one of us has to do in this room is realize and recognize and accept that we're in A fight because if you don't know you're in a fight, you're not fighting very well We're in the narrative business or the resisting narrative business whether we like it or not That's just the way it is you have to accept that and say okay Okay, we're in a fight So that fight in my strong opinion Again due to the decentralizing force of a digital technology available to us so cheap That fight is bottom-up. It's not top-down. I mean Nathaniel Brandon has this great quote He says you know he's talking about your life and self-esteem that sort of thing This is no one's coming to save you And that's absolutely true when it comes to people like us who think like we do in this room No one's coming to save us. It's us. There is nobody. Okay. It's not it's not Brian Stelter and Jake Tapper and Sean Hannity You know these people these people are not friends. Okay, these people don't want what's best for us And we certainly can't count on academia Look at the state of modern education, especially higher education totally captured Entirely captured by just absolutely insane people and crazy theories a historical people So the onus is on us. We have to fight and and it's got to be bottom-up You know Murray Rothbard talked about this with regard to Hayek's idea I mentioned him earlier Hayek's idea that while we need to have sort of an intellectual vanguard People in academia really brilliant people who come up with the ideas of liberty and shape them and develop them And then those ideas trickle down to people like us and people in the media who are so-called second-hand dealers in ideas There's nothing wrong with being that very few of us are original thinkers and we're second-hand dealers and ideas and we go out there and Promulgate what the academic folks give us. Well, there's not too many of the academic folks in our camp these days and And Rothbard said no, no, no, we got to be bottom-up the information revolution Of course, he didn't live long enough to see a really flourishing internet But the inner information revolutions bottom-up and that means that all of us in this room We have to personally take responsibility for seeking out and finding the truth and disseminating it and spreading it to our neighbors Spreading it to our social media friends that that's on us. It's our responsibility No one is coming to save us and we have to do this in my opinion regardless of Necessarily the the ideological or political stripe of the truth tellers. We just need to find truth tellers We need to talk to them. We need to coordinate with them and we need to promote them You know so not everyone is a libertarian not everyone thinks the same way we do but there are truthful people out there across the spectrum There are people like Glenn Glenn Greenwald There are people like Caitlyn Johnstone. There are people like Matt Taiibia rolling stone There are people like No Me Prins who writes from the left on on the Fed and Goldman Sachs and Central Banking and Treasury There are people like Paul Craig Roberts. There are people like Kirk Patrick Sale Who is a wonderful guy who would absolutely try to school me on those four questions about global warming? He's a huge he's a huge believer that climate change is a is a very serious problem But I'll certainly talk to him before I talk to Bernie Sanders or someone like that about it And of course we have our own truth tellers we have people like Scott Horton We have people like Daniel McAdams. We have people like Lou Rockwell and Lou Rockwell calm So we need to be out there pushing the envelope disseminating information because as Daunting as the mainstream media is I mean has it ever been less respected? Has it ever been a Worst tool for the political class to control us. I mean there's so much pushback now. It's almost unbelievable I can't I'm still amazed sometimes that they allow replies and comments on some of these On you know New York Times for example, I'm still amazed that they allow it the Atlantic got rid of it Any any organization any media outlet that gets rid of its comments, you know why You know why okay, but the New York Times still has them I think Paul Krugman can write something just Unbelievably bad and then ten thousand people can just take into task for it all day and you know You know that guy reads That's a man who needs the approval of others So in conclusion Let me just say a few things Mises had this great quote. I'm gonna just read it. I know quotes Aren't always that easy to digest when they're not on the screen, but he wrote this in 1947 He wrote an essay called plan chaos and in some ways it's the dendem to his great book socialism from 1922 And this is what I love because this really explains that Mises even understood that the bottom-up nature of the task before us He says it's not true that the masses are inherently asking for socialism Okay, he said the masses favor socialism because they trust the socialist propaganda of the intellectuals Isn't that interesting? We have to be the intellectuals. We have to replace these guys and Frankly the bar for being an intellectual has fallen. So a lot of us are we're gonna be okay There you see, you know, you got three you got three digits in your IQ. We'll take you He says he says He's talking about the intellectuals. He says they themselves generated the socialist ideas and indoctrinated the masses with them This I love this no proletarian or son of a proletarian Has contributed to the elaboration of the interventionist and socialist program Their authors were all a bourgeois background There's anything that's as true as statementals you're over here And that's why Marxism didn't work because the working classes just never bought it the working classes never really say that's not my Economic interests and so they disappointed the intellectual vanguards in our university disappointed them So instead of coming up with class division based on income and wealth They've they've read they've you know now come up with gender and you know all kinds of identities to replace that So our task in closing more than anything is to refuse to use meaningless words and to force these people To apply language in a conscious way and in a meaningful way And so every one of us in this room has the ability to talk about the state as a predatory force in society Not as some sort of benevolent way that we organize each other. Okay, Twitter is disabused us of that clearly We need to talk about the Federal Reserve as a destroyer of wealth as something that creates instability and is a Financer of war That's what makes these wars possible We need to talk about us foreign policy as something that's dangerous and destabilizing and not only makes us let's safe And and a lot more broke and in debt as a country But also something that's going to create hatred For our kids and our grandkids from countries around the world We need it to be honest and open and talk about that but more than anything I think we need to Be of good cheer We need to recognize that we have opportunities just to disseminate information that would make literally gone Mises or Murray Rothbard absolutely astounded today the state is absolutely it's losing its control and its ability to control the narrative To a million online voices today people just like us But we all have a responsibility in this propaganda war and I think Nathaniel's brand was right no one is coming to save us So thank you very much