'Glenn Beck': Progressives' Fight for American Hearts and Minds

Woodrow Wilson, 'the most evil man we've had in office.' (FNC)

This is a rush transcript from "Glenn Beck," May 26, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

GLENN BECK, HOST: All right. I told you before that Cass Sunstein is the most dangerous man in America. And even congressmen and senators look at me like I'm a mad man, and I hope I'm wrong. But he is the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House.

If you are watching in the Capitol — please, please listen to the remaining half hour of this program because I don't think you have done your homework. I have. And if you know history, you do not repeat it. If you don't know history, you do repeat it. And this history you do not want to repeat.

Has this ever happened before? Yes. Woodrow Wilson. Sunstein is taking a page right from Wilson's playbook. And by the end of this episode, you are going to know why you do not want to even look at that playbook.

The idea is simple, that the governing elite knows best. That's why they have all these czars and everything else, because they know best. They don't need to go to Congress. They don't need to listen to the people, because the people are uninformed and incapable choosing what's best for them in society or for society on the whole. They just don't know. It's very complex.

True public opinion is denied. Have you checked the polls on Arizona? They're doing it anyway.

We checked the polls on health care. They did it anyway. We checked the polls on any of it, that they're doing it anyway.

True public opinion is denied. Alternate realities are created and presented then as truth. We call at it propaganda. That's why nothing rings true anymore. Voices of opposition are discredited, intimidated, bribed or eliminated.

Check old episodes of what we told you about all the policies that Cass Sunstein has outlaid where he says discredit these voices, eliminate these voices, infiltrate these voices.

Progressives also look to use war or the moral equivalent of war, an economic crisis, a human rights issue to push through their progressive agenda, which always includes the suspension of basic rights. You can never waste a good crisis and the ends justify the means. That is Woodrow Wilson and that is Saul Alinsky.

They also view the Constitution as an organic document, outdated in its original form. It's open to modern interpretation. Wilson I think hated it.

All right. So, let's concentrate here. I hate this SOB and the more you learn about this guy, the more you will, too. This is — this is the most evil guy I think we've ever had in office.

1916, Woodrow Wilson won re-election in part — large part due to commitment to keep America from entering World War I. One of his campaign slogans boasted, "He kept us out of war." There was a very strong anti-war sentiment in America at the time.

Americans — if Americans favored a side, they would have gone with the Germans because Germans were the largest ethnic group in America at the time. Most people weren't paying attention. The Germans were.

OK. So, on the eve of asking Congress to declare war on Germany — yes, remember, he ran, "I'm not going to get us into war." It was about a month later — in fact, I got to give you the exact — I got to give you the exact date here because this is amazing.

1916, he was running for election. 1917, his inaugural address, March 4th, 1917, he said, "We're going to pursue peace and even though we've been injured by the effects of war, we're not going into war." That was March 4th, 1917. April 13th, 1917, America goes to war and he's got Frank Cobb.

Frank Cobb, he's the editor of The New York World newspaper at the time, a close friend and confidant of Wilson. He says these words, "We couldn't fight Germany and maintain the ideals of government that all thinking men shared."

He said, Wilson, "We'll try it, but it will be too much for us. Conformity would be the only virtue and every man who refused to conform would have to pay a penalty."

He thought the Constitution would not survive it and that free speech and right of assembly would go. But he knew better than everybody else.

See, Wilson needed to change public opinion. And change public opinion he did. I'll show that to you — next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWS BREAK)

BECK: All right. America, I'm — we need to do a history lesson here real quick. And I want you to take notes if you can, because this is stuff you never learned in school.

The problem — the emergency in 1917 was war. The progressives at the time wanted war because they thought that a bloody awful war would crush all of the imperfections of the past and there would be a — and I'm quoting, "a collective salvation for the people of Europe and the whole world."

Isn't that nice? Wilson also saw an opportunity in war. Never waste an emergency. He campaigned against war. And then, he was sworn in for a second term. A month later, we were at war. But he had to reverse the idea of American people — they didn't want war.

So he created — on April 13th, 1917, Woodrow Wilson — evil, evil man — created the Committee on Public Information. He appointed this guy, George Creel — he was a journalist — as the chairman of the Committee on Public Information.

Journalists, you'd better listen to this history lesson, because you didn't learn it. As Creel points out in his book, "How We Advertised America," he said, "Back of the firing line, back of army and navies, back of the great supply depot, another struggle waged with the same intensity and almost equal intensity and almost equal significance attaching to its victories and its defeats. It was the fight for the minds of men, for the conquest of their convictions, the battle line ran through every home in the country."

Got it? The country was at war. But there was another war going on, grabbing the minds of the American people. On censorship, he wrote — censorship of the press, he said, "With the nation in arms, the need was not so much to keep the press from doing the hurtful things as to get them to do the helpful things. It was not servants we wanted. It was associates."

Go back and look at what the president is saying now. He wants associates. He wants partners. And don't you treat FOX like a real institution. You're not like them. Creel was assisted by two close advisors to Wilson. These guys — whoo-wee! America, you need to learn about them.

Did I just sound like that Cajun chef? Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann — every journalist in America. You want to know why journalism doesn't get it? You know why journalism isn't on top of it? Because they have read Walter Lippmann. He is almost as evil, if not more evil, than this guy.

This guy is taught in every journalism class all throughout America as a good guy. A hero. Bernays is called the "Father of Spin." From his book called "Propaganda," he writes and I quote, "If we misunderstand the mechanisms — if we understand the mechanisms of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without knowing it."

These are journalists. In his memoirs, he wrote that he was shocked to discover that Nazi P.R. genius, Joseph Goebbels, actually kept copies of his writings in his own personal library.

Yes, Goebbels — where is the picture? Here it is — Goebbels, in his library, had his theories therefore helping to engineer the rise of the Third Reich. He said, quote, "Goebbels — Goebbels was using my book crystallizing public opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me."

Why? Big government — it doesn't matter. You can use it for your socialist or your progressive goals. Or you can use it to exterminate people. When you've set it all up, it just depends who is running it, doesn't it?

Of the CPI's war effort, Bernays writes in propaganda, quote, "It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. It was only natural after the war ended that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace."

Are you liking him so far? Yeah. Now, let me introduce you to Walter Lippmann. This guy wrote a book — what is it — "The Phantom Public." I couldn't even finish. I've read horrific things. I couldn't finish that man's book. It is so diabolical.

Walter Lippmann, one of the most popular and highly revered journalists in history — his views were consistent with Bernays.

Here it is, "The hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile, is that news and truth are not the same thing and must clearly be distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event. The function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other and to make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points where the social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape do the body of truth and the body of news coincide. That is comparatively small part of the whole field of human interest."

As he further explained in his diabolical book, "Public Opinion," Lippmann believed Democratic ideals — we don't have it? He believed that Democratic ideals had deteriorated and voters were ignorant about issues and policies. And they were just dummies.

They lacked the confidence to participate in public life. They cared — they cared very little for the public process. You don't know. You don't care. You don't read those things.

He wrote quoting that the governing class must rise to face the new challenges. A governing class. Exactly what our Founders wanted. Oh, no, no, no. These people didn't believe in the Founders. This guy hated them.

When we come back, I'll show you what they created. And it was a great world. And I just want to ask you when I show you what they've created if you've seen it again, like now. I'll show you in a minute.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BECK: I know everybody just hates it when it's — Oh, stop calling the president a Nazi. OK, great. Totally fine. I don't think I've done that. Just comparing here to the beloved Woodrow Wilson who created the Committee on Public Information in 1917 and had these guys.

Remember, journalists — journalists, all of them. And they're — look them up. By and large, the journalists that were out there complied with the official CPI guidelines in order to stay inside the information loop because the journalists had a decision to make.

Do we do what the Public Information Office is telling us or do we get cut off? Think of all of these and see if there is any relationship at all to what is happening today because we're repeating the Wilson administration.

The news agencies that didn't respect the CPI's request were moved out of the information loop. Gee, who did that? I think President Obama did, by saying no, no. FOX isn't even a real news organization. Tried to cut us out of the pool feeds.

They issued 6,000 press releases. They also had 75,000 four-minute men. What are four-minute men? These guys delivered 7.5 million speeches, spoke in front of 300 million people all controlled by these guys, OK? Four minutes — because that was the time it took to change the newsreel.

Periodicals were also sent out to more than 600,000 teachers for their use in their classrooms. It's almost like the EPA now coming in and teaching social and ecological justice.

The Boy Scouts were used to deliver Wilson's addresses door-to- door. Wow, that's almost like community organizing. Almost 1,500 unique poster designs, many of them created to depict German people as blood- thirsty monsters. OK. These are some of the posters.

And gosh, this is almost like what they are doing with the National Endowment for the Arts, isn't it? Creating posters. Oh, and they also made movies like "Pershing's Crusaders" which — I mean, they already have Hollywood, so you've got that all under the direction.

There was an official newspaper delivered daily to 100,000. Is that MSNBC? Is that The Huffington Post? Who is that? Then they kicked it up a notch. First, they did The Espionage Act of 1917 — June 1917. Wilson asked Congress to pass this Espionage Act making at it crime for anyone to interfere with the war effort through acts such as denouncing the draft.

That is espionage? Well, we had to kick that out. A year later, he escalates the fight against free speech by signing into law The Sedition Act which imposed fines and imprisonment for anyone convicted of criticizing the Constitution, the government, the military or the flag.

You've got to put the flag in there because it makes Americans proud. It's widely regarded as one of the most repressive legislations in regards to free speech. We have never done anything like it before.

Approximately 2,000 people were convicted under this Sedition Act under Woodrow Wilson. Many served prison time, many for the rest of the Wilson administration until America came to their senses.

I want to show you this. We're at the Sedition Act, because it's all being repeated — all of it. Here's an article from The Boston Globe about Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Obama's good friend.

Gov. Patrick, who even decried partisanship in Washington, said today Republican opposition to the President Obama's agenda — agenda has become so opposite that it's almost to the level of sedition — sedition.

So in the end, what were the consequences of crossing Woodrow Wilson, the progressive hero? Next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BECK: America, there is a lot to take in here. And I hope if you DVR the show, you go back and watch it maybe a couple times. We'll come back to this tomorrow.

I want to show the comparisons of Woodrow Wilson and what we're doing now. There were dire consequences of the Committee on Public Information. And here they are. The first one is — the Department of Justice made lists of people that they say were dangerous.

These were people that engaged in espionage all the way to just making pro-German statements. They kept people on a list. Then the DOJ oversaw and set up prisons in military camps for Americans that they just couldn't trust.

In California — California, remember — the great progressive state of California, the Board of Education there banned teaching of German in public schools because they said that was a language of brutality and hatred.

Does any of this sound familiar? We could never — we could never do these things. Really? We have already done them. Two administrations — Wilson and FDR. Then, the Red Cross barred people with German names from working with the Red Cross. They isolated them.

German names were then scrubbed from the buildings and streets. Schmidt became Smith. Mueller became Miller. And then, there is this one. This one is happening. The media and everybody else excuses correct violence. If you are on the right side, that's OK.

In Minnesota, a minister was tarred and feathered because he overheard — he was overheard praying over a dying woman in German. Tarred and feathered. Those people were acquitted because they were doing their patriotic duty.

Propaganda — you can get people to do all kinds of things. Now, a quick comparison — Wilson had the CPI. FDR had Office of War Information. Pretty much same stuff. And Obama has Cass Sunstein and OIRA.

Oh, and he also has Media Matters and Center for American Progress and MSNBC and The Huffington Post and — where else — the New York Times. I could go on.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BECK: I'm sorry, America, but I'm going to leave you with a homework assignment because we're out of time. I want you to read "Phillip Dru: Administrator." You could probably find it online. Read it. It is this man's hero and it's the architect of — it will show you what we're headed for. Tomorrow, FDR, Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama. You don't want to miss it.

Content and Programming Copyright 2010 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2010 Roll Call, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of Roll Call. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.