Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, is considered to be the father of modern propaganda. You could even say he wrote the book on it, published in 1928. He said that the Germans had given propaganda a bad name during WWII, so he came up with the term public relations as a synonym for propaganda.
After WWI, Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to encourage women to smoke. He staged a publicity stunt at a Easter Day Parade in New York City in 1929 where women hid cigarettes in garter belts under their dresses and lit them up at the same time, calling them "torches of freedom."
He was also hired by the Beech-Nut Packing Company, which sold bacon and came up with the idea of having bacon and eggs for breakfast. It worked.
In the late 1940s, he was hired by ALCOA to push the idea on us that ingesting fluoride was good for our teeth. Prior to water fluoridation, ALCOA had been getting rid of their toxic fluoride waste by selling it has insecticide and rat poison. Fluoride has never been proven to be beneficial in any way when ingested. It has only shown to offer some protection to teeth when applied topically. According to Dr. Dean Burk, who worked at the National Cancer Institute for 34 years, "fluoride causes more human cancer death, and causes it faster than any other chemical."
In 1985, Bernays appeared on the David Letterman show at age 93, and died ten years later in Cambridge, MA at the age of 103. Letterman treated Bernays like a hero for his "work," which I consider to be evil.
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