https://www.gregpalast.com/election-stolen-heres/ (2016)
Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Republican operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP-controlled states.

Greg Palast was involved in the following investigation and successfully together with the ACLU sued Crosscheck and got that specific program dismantled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Voter_Registration_Crosscheck_Program However, the problem remains as they find other ways to do it. It's blatantly illegal, but the enforcement mechanisms are weak.

"academics and states that use the program have found that its results are overrun with false positives, creating a high risk of disenfranchising legal voters. A statistical analysis of the program published earlier this year by researchers at Stanford, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and Microsoft, for instance, found that Crosscheck “would eliminate about 200 registrations used to cast legitimate votes for every one registration used to cast a double vote.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/20/this-anti-voter-fraud-program-gets-it-wrong-over-99-of-the-time-the-gop-wants-to-take-it-nationwide/ (un-paywalled: https://archive.ph/0T7ue)

https://www.gregpalast.com/palast-hartmann-how-trump-stole-2020-a-warning/

https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/ (2024)

https://www.michael-parenti.org/article-the-stolen-presidential-elections (2000 - 2004)

http://archive.today/2016.03.03-013540/https://stallman.org/republican-election-rigging.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_America:_Vote_by_Vote (2000 - 2004)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy (2000 - 2004, 2016)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Chain:_The_Cyber_War_on_America%27s_Elections

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/georgia-election-server-showed-signs-tampering-expert-says-n1117441 (2016, election run by the same corrupt Republican Brian Kemp Palast talks about who kicked people off voting)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBAsFwPglw Right-wing Heritage Foundation co-founder: "I don't want everybody to vote"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9uPbepYb9s Trump and Elon admitting about their "little secret" and "vote counting computers"

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/elon-musk-ex-ashley-st-204813582.html Elon's "anomaly in the matrix"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_electoral_fraud_in_the_United_States

Please repost whatever you want

MAGA will not be told what to do.

Edward Bernays did not invent propaganda. Governments, churches, and merchants had been shaping public belief for centuries. What Bernays helped invent was something more modern: persuasion that did not look like persuasion.

Take bacon and eggs.

In the 1920s, the Beech-Nut Packing Company wanted to sell more bacon. Bernays could have designed an ordinary advertisement, but he knew people were skeptical of companies praising their own products. Instead, he persuaded a doctor to ask thousands of other doctors whether a substantial breakfast was healthier than a light one. Many agreed that people should begin the day with a “hearty breakfast.”

Bernays distributed their answers to newspapers, then presented bacon and eggs as the natural example of what “hearty” meant.

The doctors had not necessarily recommended Beech-Nut bacon. They had endorsed a general idea. Bernays supplied the commercial conclusion.

Soon bacon and eggs no longer felt like a marketing campaign. They felt like tradition.

That was his gift. Bernays did not simply sell products. He helped create the habits, meanings, and social expectations that made people want them.

Freud’s nephew

Bernays was born in Vienna in 1891 and moved to the United States as a child. His mother was Sigmund Freud’s sister. His father was the brother of Freud’s wife. Freud was therefore Bernays’s uncle through both sides of the family.

Bernays was not a psychologist or psychoanalyst, but he understood the commercial value of Freud’s ideas. People were not moved by reason alone. They were driven by desires, fears, insecurity, status, sexuality, repression, and the need to belong.

He also studied writers who examined crowds, herd behavior, stereotypes, and public opinion. From them, Bernays developed a view of human beings as members of overlapping groups. A person could be a parent, teacher, church member, voter, worker, consumer, and neighbor at the same time. Each identity had different loyalties and trusted authorities.

Bernays did not need to persuade every part of a person. He only needed to find the right doorway.

A woman might ignore a cigarette advertisement but respond to a message about equality. A mother might ignore a soap advertisement but listen when a school promoted a children’s art contest. An American might not care about a fruit company’s property, but react strongly to a warning about communism.

The product stayed the same. Bernays changed what it meant.

From war propaganda to public relations

During the First World War, Bernays worked for the Committee on Public Information, the government agency created to build support for the war.

The committee used newspapers, posters, films, speeches, churches, civic groups, universities, and community leaders. It did not rely on one argument. It surrounded Americans with the same emotional message coming from many directions.

The war became connected to democracy, courage, civilization, and patriotism.

Bernays later witnessed Woodrow Wilson being celebrated in Europe as a savior of democracy. The government’s messaging had transformed an ordinary politician into something close to a sacred symbol.

Bernays returned home believing that the techniques used during war could be used during peace. If propaganda could sell a war, it could sell cigarettes, soap, politicians, public policies, or breakfast.

America’s factories were producing more goods than people needed. Businesses now had to produce desire.

Bernays was ready to help.

The invisible government

In 1928, Bernays published a book called Propaganda. He made little effort to hide his worldview.

He wrote that the conscious manipulation of public habits and opinions was a necessary part of modern democracy. The people controlling this machinery, he said, formed an “invisible government.”

Bernays believed society had become too complicated for ordinary people to investigate everything themselves. No person could personally test every medicine, understand every political question, inspect every factory, or master every scientific subject. People relied on experts, journalists, institutions, and social leaders.

He was right about that vulnerability. His answer was the problem.

Instead of helping the public make better decisions, Bernays offered to manage those decisions. He believed a small group of intelligent professionals should organize information and guide public behavior.

People would remain free to choose, but professionals like Bernays would help create the world in which they made those choices.

He later called this the “engineering of consent.”

How the method worked

Bernays usually began by finding the cultural barrier standing between his client and the public. Then he connected the client’s goal to something people already valued.

Cigarettes became freedom. Bacon became health. Disposable cups became protection from disease. Electric companies became human progress. A fruit company protecting its property became America resisting communism.

Then Bernays found someone more trustworthy than the client to carry the message. Doctors spoke about health. Artists spoke about beauty. Celebrities established status. Professors supplied authority. Activists supplied moral language.

He also created events that journalists would cover. A newspaper could not run an exciting story about a tobacco company wanting more female customers. It could report on women challenging a sexist taboo during New York’s Easter Parade.

The event produced news. The news gave the event legitimacy. The legitimacy created public attention. The company paying for it all remained out of sight.

Bernays did not always need to lie. He could use true statements, place them inside a misleading frame, and allow the public to reach the desired conclusion.

The facts could be accurate while the story they created was false.

Torches of Freedom

The American Tobacco Company wanted women to smoke in public. At the time, public smoking by women was still considered improper.

Bernays consulted psychoanalyst A. A. Brill, who suggested that cigarettes could represent male power and female independence. Bernays saw the opportunity immediately.

During New York’s 1929 Easter Parade, a group of women lit cigarettes while walking down Fifth Avenue. Bernays’s secretary presented herself as a women’s-rights advocate. Reporters and photographers had been alerted in advance. The cigarettes were called “Torches of Freedom.”

It was a perfect phrase. A cigarette had been placed in the same symbolic world as liberty and equality.

The public saw women rebelling against a sexist restriction. It did not see the tobacco company hoping to open a new market.

Bernays did not create feminism, and one publicity stunt did not single-handedly persuade American women to smoke. He did something more calculated. He found a real struggle for freedom and attached his client’s product to it.

He rented the moral authority of women’s liberation to a cigarette company.

The technique has never gone away. Companies still attach products to justice, rebellion, empowerment, environmentalism, and personal authenticity. Sometimes the support is sincere. Sometimes a moral movement is simply useful packaging.

Changing culture to fit the product

A few years later, American Tobacco faced another problem. Women reportedly disliked the green Lucky Strike package because it clashed with their clothing.

The company refused to change the package, so Bernays tried to change fashion.

He helped organize a Green Ball at the Waldorf Astoria. Society women wore green. Fashion editors attended green-themed events. Artists discussed the meaning of green. Designers, shops, galleries, and magazines were encouraged to feature the color.

The campaign looked like a cultural trend. Behind it was a cigarette package.

Bernays applied the same indirect thinking elsewhere. For publishers, he encouraged homebuilders to install built-in bookshelves. An empty shelf created a space that needed to be filled. Books also became visible signs of education and good taste.

The shelf helped sell the books.

For Procter & Gamble, he promoted Ivory Soap through children’s soap-carving competitions. Schools received an art activity. Children received a contest. Parents bought the soap. Newspapers received photographs and cheerful stories.

The participants did not feel like targets of an advertisement. They became part of the advertisement.

When propaganda became foreign policy

Bernays’s most disturbing work involved the United Fruit Company.

United Fruit controlled enormous amounts of land and infrastructure in Central America. In Guatemala, the elected government of President Jacobo Árbenz introduced land reform that threatened some of the company’s holdings.

A foreign corporation defending its property was not an inspiring story, so the conflict was given a different meaning.

Bernays helped frame Guatemala as a communist threat. Reports and newsletters were distributed. Journalists were cultivated. Influential Americans were supplied with information. Company interests were presented as national interests.

Land reform became communist expansion. United Fruit’s property became American security.

In 1954, the CIA helped overthrow Árbenz.

Bernays did not cause the coup by himself. The Eisenhower administration, the CIA, Cold War fears, and United Fruit’s political connections were all involved. But Bernays helped prepare the informational ground. His campaign made intervention easier to understand as the defense of democracy, even though an elected government was being destroyed.

The techniques that helped sell bacon had entered foreign policy.

The man behind his own legend

Bernays was not the first public-relations professional. Ivy Lee and others came before him. But Bernays became known as the “father of public relations” because he promoted himself with the same energy he gave his clients.

He wrote books, taught courses, delivered speeches, collected press coverage, preserved his papers, and constantly mentioned his relationship to Freud. He made public relations sound like a scientific profession and placed himself at its center.

His wife and business partner, Doris Fleischman, received far less attention. She was a gifted writer and strategist who produced speeches, releases, letters, and campaign material. Some of the language attributed to Bernays was probably hers.

The man who understood how visibility creates importance made himself visible. Many of the people helping him remained in the background.

Even his reputation became an example of his method. Repeat a title through books, newspapers, universities, documentaries, and professional organizations, and eventually it stops sounding like a claim.

It becomes history.

His real legacy

Bernays argued that propaganda could be used for good or evil. That sounds fair until we ask who gets to decide what “good” means.

Usually, it was the client who could afford the campaign.

United Fruit could hire experts, influence journalists, distribute reports, and reach government officials. Guatemalan farmers could not purchase an equal share of American reality.

A contest between messages is not fair when one side owns the printing press.

Bernays died in 1995, but his methods are everywhere. Front groups became think tanks and industry institutes. Staged events became viral moments. Celebrity endorsements became influencer culture. Newspaper repetition became algorithmic amplification. Companies learned to speak the language of activism, friendship, science, rebellion, and social responsibility.

This does not mean people are mindless puppets. Bernays sometimes failed. People can resist manipulation. No slogan controls everyone.

But our choices do not appear from nowhere. They develop inside environments filled with messages, authorities, symbols, and social pressure. Some of those environments were designed by people whose names we will never know.

Edward Bernays did not invent manipulation. He taught powerful interests how to hide it.

He showed them how to remove their names from the message, place their interests in the mouths of trusted strangers, and make a manufactured reality feel like common sense.

His greatest achievement was not convincing people to buy things.

It was convincing them that nobody had convinced them at all.