Propaganda, Donald Trump and The Plain Truth (Transcript)

I don’t think many Americans know that the United States also had its form of political propaganda going on before World War II and during World War II. Are you aware that some of the famous movies that you may be familiar with were actually paid for by the American government in order to convince people that we wanted to fight? – Bob Barney

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Hi, this is Bob Barney with The Plain Truth Today, and today’s program I’m calling Trump, Propaganda, and the Plain Truth.

For those that don’t know me, my name is Bob Barney, and I run a paint company, and I also run the plaintruth.com website, as well as the Plain Truth Today broadcast. My background is in political science. I graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1977 with a degree in political science and really in foreign affairs and national relations and politics. They were my majors, so I do have a little bit of knowledge.

2:58 I’m not saying I’m the smartest bean on the face of the earth like President Donald Trump, but I spent an entire year, my senior year, taking two political propaganda courses. Those courses were a study in how different nations and different peoples used propaganda over the years. We studied the Hitler movies, and they were really copying America however the Germans saturated their country with many types of propaganda to convince the German citizens that the Nazi ideology was the only ideology that was real.

Joseph Goebbels, who was the father of the propaganda films, said, the essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end, they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it.

I don’t think many Americans know that the United States also had its form of political propaganda going on before World War II and during World War II. Are you aware that some of the famous movies that you may be familiar with were actually paid for by the American government in order to convince people that we wanted to fight?

5:35 You understand, in the 1930s, most Americans wanted to stay out of any European war. They were so burned in World War I, getting into a war in Europe, they found out after the fact they should have never been in in the first place. It is almost like Ukraine or even Vietnam for us today as to the reason why they did not want to get into any European war. When FDR realized that a war was coming, he could not convince the American people that war was coming. Certain Hollywood producers and film directors, Frank Capra comes to mind as the most famous, understood the need that America was going to have to go to war with the Germans. In turn, they started doing political propaganda films, like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, for example, or Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, or our very famous one, Casablanca.

If you have not watched the movie Casablanca, I really wholeheartedly endorse you watching that movie. When you do so this time, do so under the idea that this was a political propaganda film to get Americans to want to fight. Look at the main character, Rick, who is an American owner of a foreign bar in Morocco, and he wants nothing to do with World War II. The Americans have entered the war, or I don’t believe they have yet entered the war, and he’s being neutral himself, and he doesn’t care who wins. He doesn’t like the Germans at all, but at the same time, he doesn’t want to get involved. By the end of the movie, what happens? He gives up the girl he loves in order to go fight a war against the Nazis. Think about what that was trying to tell the American public. 

7:59 Earlier, before even that movie, before there was any world war going on, Frank Capra had a very famous movie that was redone in about 2010, maybe. It took place in my own hometown of New Milford, Connecticut, but the original was called Mr. Deeds Goes to Town by Frank Capra, starring Gary Cooper. Jean Arthur was the female cast, and, in that movie, the man was a local kind of hit kind of guy who became a millionaire overnight when his uncle was killed in a car crash. He goes to New York City from Vermont, and now he’s being surrounded by all these vultures trying to steal his money, telling him what he has to do, and he starts to rebel against it. The person that is trying to steal all of his money and to run his estate has a little mustache like Adolf Hitler. It doesn’t take very much to realize that that person is portraying not only a bankster, because that’s what he was, but also, he symbolized Nazi Germany, the German thought, and Adolf Hitler. When Gary Cooper decides he’s going to give away all of his money to the poor people that are facing terrible times during the Great Depression of the 1930s, he is taken to court by this banker who looks like Hitler to try to take away his money from him because he’s too incompetent and does not have enough sanity in order to give away his money.

So, somebody has to take it away from him.

The whole movie moves to a courtroom where he sits there like Jesus at his conviction in front of Pontius Pilate, and he never says a word. The reason he’s not defending himself, he finds out the girl he loves was a newspaper reporter in disguise to make him look like a fool. When he finds that out, brokenhearted by the one person he trusted, he just remains silent. He is a character, or he is a representation of the American character. 

Anybody who understood America back in the 1930s, as Frank Capra did, understands that Gary Cooper, more than John Wayne, really represented the American character of the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. This was a silent, strong type of hero that does not want to fight, does not want to stand up for themselves, does not want to defend themselves, however, when they’re pushed to the wall, they will lash out like no peoples of the world.

10:35 The Nazis found that out when the American soldiers ended the war and found out they had found an enemy that would never surrender.

So, the movie goes on and it shows that Gary Cooper comes out of this, and he fights back after the girl says she loves him in the movie. It’s kind of a romantic, it’s kind of a funny, it’s a great movie to really watch the original, not the remake. But you’ll understand that it was a propaganda film.

Frank Capra understood that the American character was somebody who did not fight until they were attacked and he understood that we were going to be attacked.

You know, in 1925, Billy Mitchell, a general in the United States Army who is the father of the modern air force in World War II, the Mitchell bomber was named after him, was court-martialed because he said air power was going to replace naval power and military power in wars to come. In fact, he did a show where he sank a battleship with air power in the early 1920s. He was so vocal and disobeyed his commanders that they finally court-martialed him for disobedience because he was trying to prepare America for the war with Japan. Not Germany, but he was really talking about Japan. Believe it or not, in his trial, Billy Mitchell predicted that Japan would attack the United States at Pearl Harbor with aircraft and destroy the entire American fleet. He did this, I believe, in the late 1920s or early 1930s, a good 10 years before Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor, it was very obvious that Billy Mitchell was right.

14:21 In the board of generals, you know, and when you’re court-martialed, the board of generals, I don’t know how many there are, decide your fate. The majority rules if they’re going to remove you or not. The only general to vote against the court-martial of General Billy Mitchell was none other than General Douglas MacArthur, who realized, in my opinion, that everything Billy Mitchell was saying about modern warfare was correct. That modern warfare, the airplane was going to be dominant over any other thing, Navy, Army, you name it, there was in the past. And he turned out to be right. But these political propaganda movies, the Nazis were, Triumph of the Will was the big one of Hitler, showing him, all the angles had to be up, he had to look like he was a god-like figure, and it starts off with his airplane coming out of the clouds like Jesus down to earth.

They tried to make him into a messiah-like figure.

When you look at him, and when I was watching him in 1976 and 1977, in the midst of still the Vietnam generation and the peaceniks in college around me, it was really funny and comical to watch Nazi propaganda films. Why? Because they were so bad. You could see through that propaganda. You could understand that it was all nonsense. When we started watching the American propaganda films, like Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, or Casablanca, you had an audience, even though they should have known better, and they were hippies, and they were peaceniks, and they were against war, they were intrigued with those movies.

16:27 Then we got to a series of movies directed by Frank Capra called the Why We Fight series. The Why We Fight series was five movies, five one-hour movies that was not made for public viewing. They were never intended to be watched by the public. They were indoctrination movies that was shown to new soldiers in boot camp to explain to them why we were fighting in a war that just two years earlier, every American did not want to be in. So it gave a history. The first one gave the history of the American people and what drives the American people…it’s really a good one. Then the next one shows the Nazis and the Japanese Nazis. Then it shows the war for Britain and the war for Russia. These are other movies. And even though I was living in a time when everyone said they wanted peace, these are the same people leading the countries today, taking us in every war there’s ever been. But at the time, they say wanted peace. When Frank Capra was done with them, showing them the pictures of Nazi atrocities, Japanese atrocities, bombing, little babies being burned to death, by the end of those movies, every time the Americans or the British was bombing the Germans or the Japanese, or you saw Japanese soldiers being burned to death with flame torches, this pacifist crowd, and it was about 600. It was in a big auditorium. We watched this. It was a big class in college. This auditorium would erupt in cheers. These pacifists wanted to fight by watching the Frank Capra movies.

That’s how good the American propaganda films were.

As a matter of fact, Frank Capra, when he was asked about his role in making these movies, said propaganda is very easy to do when the facts are on your side. It’s pretty hard to do for the Germans because the facts weren’t on their side. A little side note. I like to give side notes, little history things. Frank Capra was one of the most successful directors of the time. Still, when you watch the movie Christmas Time, I guess everybody watches It’s a Wonderful Life. That’s Frank Capra. He always ended his movies with the Liberty Bell ringing. V for victory and the Liberty Bell ringing. He was an Italian American, but he was a very patriotic American at that. But anyway, when he joined the military, left Hollywood and joined the military, he had to, of course, answer a bunch of questions before he got his commission as captain. This young lad, probably a private, who’s filling out the paperwork, said, Mr. Capra, can you tell me your name? And he gives him his name, your occupation. I’m a director. How much money do you make? Now, this was a time when the average person in America made $400 to $500 a year. Really rich people made $1,000, maybe $1,200 a year. He says, and what is your salary? And he said, $10,000 and the kid looked up at him in amazement and says, you make $10,000 a year? And he said, son, I make $10,000 a week.

Hollywood never felt the depression, as you could see.

18:49 What we learned in this class was that America probably was the best form or the best lecturers or the best students of propaganda films ever to exist in the face of the earth. And then we realized later on that these propaganda films that worked in World War II would also work in peacetime. It would work molding Americans to believe in your way of life, your way of politics. That is what started happening when Hollywood decided in the 1950s and the 1960s that it could re-educate the American society through movies, propaganda, how you should think, what was right, what was wrong. And they started, it’s like the frog in the hot water until it boils and dies. It started molding the Americans into looking at things in a very liberal way. They showed reasons why you should support abortion back when the 1960s and early 70s, before the Roe versus Wade decision, for example. They had TV shows. I remember a Mannex, which showed you a really good reason why a woman shouldn’t have a back door or back-alley abortion. The guy butchered her, and she died from bleeding and never talked about adoption or never gave you any real options. What they were trying to do was to mesmerize the American public that they just didn’t know better.Listen to us. We know what’s best for America. We know what’s best for Americans.

It was all propaganda.

Most of you who are listening to me, if you’re 16 or 60 or 90, you have grown up in a world of propaganda…you just haven’t realized it. When I went to school, I realized propaganda. 

When I come back after this break, I’m going to get into what the topic is of today about Trump and propaganda and the plain truth.

20:21 Hi, this is Bob Barney with the Plain Truth Today. I want to tell you about this broadcast and all the things we have on theplaintruth.com. Please come to this site every day, theplaintruth.com. Listen to these broadcasts. It’s not just me you can listen to, we have other voices as well like Bill O’Reilly and Tucker Carlson and others, and we have a Message Board you can contribute to as far as adding news articles and/or comments you would like to share. We have Your Health Today, and also the Plain Truth front page with the leading articles of the day. What’s important about The Plain Truth is we tell you what the news is and what it means for you and your family. And if so, in some cases, if the Bible is talking about it, if God wants you to know what the future is, we’d like to tell you that the future is in the news. Reading yesterday’s headlines or watching yesterday’s reports doesn’t help you necessarily for tomorrow. It’s better to know what’s coming tomorrow. And believe it or not, theplaintruth.com brings you tomorrow’s news because the Bible has already written the headlines. This is Bob Barney for the Plain Truth, and we’ll be right back to the show in a few seconds.

Bob Barney again, and I just wanted to go on with the subject about propaganda films, propaganda in general, President Donald Trump, and the plain truth. This broadcast, of course, is the Plain Truth today. I’m Bob Barney. I recognize propaganda when I see it. First of all, commercials are meant to be propaganda. You learn this in propaganda classes. There are certain phrases that you use in commercials to make people agree with you instantly. Some of the phrases are, everyone knows that, or scientists agree, or doctors confirm. These are statements that are just propaganda statements. They don’t tell you which doctors, which scientists, or which people agree. It’s a way to say something that when you hear it, you automatically accept that it’s true, and you do not question. The idea of most political propaganda or propaganda commercials about buying some product is that you do not question what they tell you is the facts. When you start questioning often, you find out there is no real facts behind their assertions, and that is what propaganda in commercials are all about. Well, the same happens in politics. The same happens in news. The same happens with news stations. The same happens with you and me when we talk to others. When someone asks you what you do for a living, you tell them in a way that you think is going to impress them the most if you’re trying to impress them.

Now, if you’re not trying to impress them and you’re a garbage collector, you say, I’m a trash man. If it’s a girl that you’re trying to date, you call yourself a sanitation engineer. But you always try to limit the facts to make you look good and not bad. That’s just what everybody does. That’s everybody’s nature. And that is the nature of everything you watch on TV, you listen to, the music you listen to. Everyone is trying to get your attention and they’re trying to get you to agree with them. You don’t realize that’s what everybody’s trying to do. That’s what every commercial is trying to do.

That’s what President Donald Trump is trying to do.

That’s what the anti-President Donald Trump Democrats are trying to do.

22:59 They’re all filling you with facts and figures, most of which are fake, or they’re slanted their way. There are many ways you can look at things. Mark Twain most famously said, and I always think about this when somebody starts throwing out facts and figures, there are lies, there are damn lies, and then there are statistics. Because you can prove anything with statistics. It’s how you interpret them and how you want to report them. And the left stream media has done a great job in the last 30 years using statistics to prove things that are not true to be true. Global warming does not exist. Greenhouse gases do not exist. Evolution is a lie. All of these things that you have been led to believe in the last 30 years are based on lies and statistics that are manipulated to make you look at something in a particular way so other people can get filthy, rotten, rich.

For example, Al Gore, who said 20 years ago that polar bears were all going to be extinct by 2010. Well, they’re still here. He said the Arctic was going to be gone by 2008.They’re still here. And he’s richer than he was back in 1999 when he said it. Matter of fact, he’s a billionaire because of it. These people that are behind the Green New Deal, for example, they’re behind it because they’re invested financially in it. So they use propaganda and fake statistics to fool you and to believe in what they are saying is accurate.

What we have now is this is the propaganda that is coming out of the Trump camp. If you are a MAGA Republican, I am a mega Republican, though I know many people are going to question me in the next few months because I am not a MAGA Republican who left my brain at the door.

I kept my brain.

23:54 I understand propaganda when I hear it so let’s go over a few facts that are the plain truth about the propaganda being perpetrated in the name of President Donald Trump. Trump did not win in a landslide. President Donald Trump didn’t even win the majority of the popular vote. He didn’t even get to 50 percent. A landslide would have been that he won by three or 350 electoral votes. A landslide would have been that he had 65 or 70 percent of the national vote or at least at least 55 percent of the national popular vote. A landslide would have been that he had coattails that would allowed the senators in the swing states to get elected. Trump took some of these swing states by 10 and 12 points. Yet the senator who was mega Republican candidates running for Senate in those states like Cary Lake in Arizona lost and lost pretty big. And why is that? That’s not a mandate.

That’s not a landslide.

It’s to tell you over and over and over again in a propaganda way, I won by a landslide…so you have to let me do whatever I want to do. He goes and he tells this to the members of the House in Congress, the Republican House members.

Tight now he’s got most of them snowed and scared because they don’t want him to be their enemy and primary them in another two years. But this is all going to come to an end because here’s the problem with propaganda. The problem with propaganda is what Frank Capra said. Propaganda is very easy when the facts are on your side. But when the facts are not on your side, then propaganda becomes lies and lies become known. Once they’re known, people become mad.

Here is some of the propaganda that we were being told. We were told that we were going to have an end to the Ukraine war before he took the presidency. Does anybody remember that? Well, it hasn’t happened. In fact, I think he’s kind of bungling Ukraine. Then saying several weeks ago saying that we were going to own Gaza when no one in their right mind, if anyone understands the Bible, especially knows we’re not going to own Gaza. We’re never going to win in the Middle East because there’s always going to be trouble in the Middle East until Jesus Christ returns.

Just a simple reading of the Bible and understanding who the players are tells you that.

Then we get to this idea about why he was elected. He thinks he was elected for many reasons that are not true. He was elected for two reasons. One was to close the border, not to deport every illegal alien, not the people working next to you at work that you kind of like. To close the border, stop criminals from coming over the border, arrest these criminals and send them back or send them to Guantanamo. That’s one of the things he was elected for. The first thing he was elected for was to save the economy for the middle and lower class. They are sinking, they are drowning underwater in debt, they’re using their credit cards to the max because they cannot afford food, they cannot afford gasoline, they cannot afford anything. American businesses, especially small businesses, are suffering because of this.

So far, 30 days into his administration, we’ve seen all kinds of moves with Ukraine. We’ve seen all kinds of moves with the tariffs, which causes inflation, by the way. We’ve seen every kind of move that Trump’s doing for arrogance, but we have not seen any lowering of food prices. We have not seen any investigation why there’s an egg crisis, which in my opinion is manufactured. We have not seen, for example, any real attempt to lower the price of gasoline or to drill more oil or to force the Arab nations to produce more oil if they want to be our friends. These are the kind of things that we need to do right now. We need to get the American people, the people who voted for President Trump, with hope and change, but they really want to have hope in dollars and not hope in change. And they have hope, and they have change, but they don’t have the dollars. Until someone gets to him and wakes him up that he did not win by a mandate.

This is not about Trump.

Trump is not the movement.

25:24 The movement is American people trying to save America from the left-stream mainstream media and the leftist communist Democrats. That is the enemy. That is who the American people want to get rid of. And if we do not understand this, and we do not understand political propaganda when we hear it, including from President Donald Trump and his associates that get up here at CPAC.I couldn’t even listen to CPAC over the weekend. All they just said there is, everything’s going great. This is the greatest 30 days ever been. This is going to be the greatest 100 days. Nothing has helped the American public up until this point. Nothing.

You’re paying more money for gas than you did a month ago. You’re paying more money for groceries than you did a month ago. You’re paying more money for fuel oil than you did a month ago. We have a very cold winter. Those are the issues. Those are the things that if we do not get a hold of right away in this administration, it will be a failed administration.

It is that simple…and that is the plain truth.

There is hope for this administration and there is hope for President Donald Trump. I think he could be the greatest president of my lifetime, but he is not right now. He is too much drunk on himself and drunk on what he thinks the mandate he got was. He thinks everybody in America now loves him. Look at the polls, President Trump. 43% of America think you’re doing a good job 30 days into your presidency, the lowest of any president in 100 years. Think about that. You have to get smart. You have to think about the American public who put you there, who trusts you, who knows you have the ability to change this country around like you did in 2017 and in 2018.

27:11 I just heard this morning there’s a new strain of COVID coming from China just in time for the 26 elections. Be aware of what’s happening, President Donald Trump. Your friends, your billionaires that are surrounding you, your Zuckerberg’s, all of these people, they’re going to stab you in the back. The people who won’t stab you in the back was the people who brought you to the party. The American public who works day and night trying to make ends meet and are sinking and drowning.

The Plain Truth and Bob Barney are talking for those people because nobody, nobody in the Republican Party and nobody, nobody in the MAGA movement is thinking about you right now. They’re too busy making victory laps and trying to get even with Democrats and trying to get even with the lawfare politicians who cause trouble for President Donald Trump and other people.

Vengeance is the Lord’s.

Let the Lord repay their vengeance.

He will do so. Get to work. Do what you were told to do. Change this economy. Lower prices. Help the little guy…

…and THEN you’ll be a successful and great president.

29:00 This is Bob Barney for the Plain Truth Today. Again, these broadcasts that I’ve had lately sound pretty bad, and I understand that. There is good news coming though.

God is the good news.

There are good headlines coming, but there is bad to report too. Sometimes when you’re talking and you’re interpreting what God wants you to know, there’s a lot of bad news as well. I’m sorry to be the Jeremiah that has to bring it to you because nobody else seems to want to right now.

Until tomorrow, this is Bob Barney for the Plain Truth today saying thank you for listening. I appreciate you.

Keep God in mind and always look to God’s Word, the Bible. Bye-bye.