Who is Dr. Hunter Madsen?

Who is Hunter Madsen, really, and why does he want to dominate the Port Moody political scene?

Councillor Hunter Madsen presents himself himself as a Johnny-come-lately to politics, entering the municipal arena as a way to give back following a successful career as a tech executive, a Madison Ave. ad man, and an academic. However, if we examine Madsen’s life and career more closely, we see that he is deeply political—and that his varied pursuits have had a single common thread. That common thread is that he is an expert and professional persuader.

Madsen has used many different names to describe his field of expertise, each carrying a different shade of meaning: persuasion, marketing, public relations, influence, public opinion, advertising…and, if we may quote directly from his book: “we’re talking about propaganda.” (After The Ball, p. 161)

Mark Hunter Madsen has always been bright. He earned his BA in Government and Russian Studies from Dartmouth College in 1977, where the long-haired young leftist from Southern California jumped at the opportunity to study abroad in both Ceaușescu’s Communist Romania (the most hated of the Eastern Bloc communist dictatorships) and the USSR. This can be found on his LinkedIn profile.

Thereafter, he decamped to Harvard. It was in those hallowed halls that he began his deep study of the science of persuasion, psychology and propaganda. It was there too that he met Marshall Kenneth Kirk, a student of neuropsychology and fellow member of Cambridge’s gay community.

Madsen didn’t just want to learn about persuasion, he wanted to put it to use – so he and Kirk, drawing from their studies of political science, psychology, marketing and propaganda, started working together to develop socio-political analyses, communications strategies and even specific ad campaigns to refine the political consciousness and enhance the position of the gay community in America. They began to publish these ideas, with Madsen using the pseudonym Erastes Pill, in publications catering to the gay community or belonging to gay rights groups,

In 1985, after completing his thesis on the shaping of global public opinion, Madsen earned a Harvard doctorate in Government—and became a hot commodity. He later recounted: “my academic work straddled the fence between politics and psychology. I was principally interested in why people agreed to things, persuasion psychology if you like. Now you understand why Madison Avenue was greatly interested in me.”

And so, the energetic, intelligent and ambitious young Dr. Madsen, with many possible paths open to him, went for a gig at the esteemed New York advertising firm J. Walter Thompson. Here he learned the advertising trade first-hand, working on campaigns for the likes of Unilever, Sprint and Chevron. He worked his way into a senior in-house position with Yahoo!, eventually ending up as director of marketing for Yahoo! Canada. Madsen’s time at the former internet titan proved to be a springboard to further digital-primary roles with Postmedia, and a startup he co-founded.

Meanwhile his publications as Erastes Pill developed a reputation for wit, insight, and controversy.

He applied those same persuasion lessons to a cause very dear to his heart, the rights and status of gay people in America. With co-author Marshall Kirk, Hunter published his signature work: “After the Ball“, based on the essay “The Overhauling of Straight America” he co-authored as Erastes Pill. The book is widely available online and makes for fascinating reading from a thoughtful activist at the top of his game.

It’s a manual for public opinion manipulation – for any objective, good or ill. Madsen and Kirk mince no words in expounding their theory of public persuasion.

• Lying is fine as long as the lies are advancing what he deems to be an ethical cause: “It makes no difference that the ads are lies; not to us, because we’re using them to ethically good effect” (p. 154)
• He is a fan of propaganda: “The campaign we outline in this book, though complex, depends centrally upon a program of unabashed propaganda, firmly grounded in long-established principles of psychology and advertising” (Introduction, xxvi) and “We mean conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media” (p. 153)
• His conception of propaganda is very specific (ft. lying, again): “Three characteristics distinguish propaganda from other modes of communication… First, propaganda relies more upon emotional manipulation than upon logic… its frequent use of outright lies… Third, even when it sticks to the facts, propaganda can be unabashedly subjective and one-sided. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this. Propaganda tells its own side of the story as movingly (and credibly) as possible” (p. 162-163)

Per his own texts, Hunter Madsen is a proud student of propaganda, a teacher of propaganda, and a practitioner of propaganda. He’s spent a four-decade career perfecting the art and science of propaganda, and is undoubtedly deploying his expertise in pursuit of his agenda for Port Moody – whatever it really is.

Perhaps after a lifetime at the cutting edge of social and technological change, Dr. Madsen decided to use his craft to freeze Port Moody in time.