MANHATTAN PROJECT

Reality Now Intrudes on the Anti-Trump Propagandists—How About You?

by Barbara Boyd

[Print version of this transcript]

This is an edited transcript of a presentation by Barbara Boyd to Lyndon LaRouche’s Manhattan Project Town Hall Meeting, Sept. 22, 2018. Boyd is the author of the LaRouche PAC investigative report, “Robert Mueller is an Amoral Legal Assassin: He Will Do His Job If You Let Him.”

I am not going to give you an extended, factual presentation. Today, we really do stand on the precipice of a fundamental change. With Trump’s order to declassify the documents — which we’ve long sought to have declassified—this battle against the coup in the United States which we’ve been fighting has entered a truly new phase.

Today, I want to draw out certain ideas we already know. Mostly I want to talk to you about how propaganda works, because I think it’s essential that people think about this in some depth.

Tour de Coup

Let’s just take, for example, the coup events of the past month. Let’s think about them not from the standpoint of a consumer of news, or you just sitting there being hit with this stuff. Rather, just for a second, put yourself in the shoes of the enemy propagandist, who is intent on overturning the results of the 2016 election, with Donald Trump as the target. Let’s look at the series of images which have been presented to you. Let’s get inside their minds, put yourself in the meetings of the Washington, D.C. and London PR shops that make a business out of this. I know, it’s like taking a swim down at the sewage treatment plant, but bear with me, because I just need you to think this through a little bit.

First, we have the death of John McCain. Powerful themes hit you endlessly, just preceding his death and through his very public funeral: war hero, jovial rascal, iconoclast, father, cancer victim—just like Ted Kennedy; steadfast champion of the postwar order which allegedly kept world peace. Endless soldiers and ordinary citizens salute his casket as the hearse rides by. This image meant something when it was the train carrying Bobby Kennedy’s body, but it has now been staged endlessly to honor every single one of the Establishment’s heroes. In the midst of this, Senator McCain is serenaded by Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Donald Trump, according to this propaganda campaign, sits in the White House fuming and spewing out hatred.

Then we have Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear. Donald Trump is here portrayed as an enraged infant, throwing (pardon my language) shit at every turn against the beliefs we allegedly hold dear. For example the war in Afghanistan, globalization, the FBI/Department of Justice as an entity wholly independent from the President, our alliances which have allegedly kept the world safe from war. We can talk endlessly about how Woodward makes all of this up, but that kind of misses the purloined letter principle of Edgar Allan Poe, which sits right there in the middle of the book for everybody to see. All the stuff that Trump allegedly tramples on are things the Establishment holds most dear—their present, post-Roosevelt, British fascist order, elaborated at great length by Bob Woodward.

Then we have the Brett Kavanaugh theatre and “me-too.” The bet here is that the Women’s March hysteria, which had its dry run back in the day before Trump was inaugurated, can now be repeated to mobilize the Democratic Party suburban female vote for the mid-term elections. More than that though, it intersects the coup: We see male Senator after male Senator proclaiming that there is no presumption of innocence, that neither the accuser nor Brett Kavanaugh actually needs to be heard by anyone, to decide what amounts to a charge of criminal assault. Note, she is the person to be believed—totally, completely, and without further examination. There is a secondary goal to the Kavanaugh business, namely, creating the lawless and emotion- and rage-driven atmosphere which would have to accompany and does accompany any putative impeachment of the current President.

Then we have the most recent foray of the New York Times, the one which occurred last night. Based on the Times’ profile of Donald Trump, which they themselves have created, they believe that the revelation that Rod Rosenstein had discussed mobilizing the cabinet to use the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to get rid of Trump—and, right after James Comey was fired, had discussed wearing a wire himself to record the President in the White House—would result in the President shooting from the hip and firing Rosenstein. Rosenstein should have been disqualified a long, long time ago from any participation in the Mueller investigation, if indeed, we were functioning under anything other than a lawless regime.

The propagandists believed that this revelation would set off the constitutional crisis they have long sought as the atmosphere for removing the duly-elected President. The propagandists themselves suggested that whoever leaked this just might be the same person who wrote the anonymous piece in the New York Times that accompanied the pumping of Woodward’s book, which again painted an administration in chaotic disarray being subverted from within, in the midst of a coup.

Are You Profiled?

None of the things which these propagandists write are, of course, true in any respect. Rather, they are based on themes they think will stick, based on how they think you think. And you, my dear audience, not the President, are the real targets of this coup. If the coup succeeds, we’re back in the days of Bush and Obama. We’re back in the days of clinging to an empire in decline. We’re back in the days of facing the almost certain inevitability of nuclear annihilation, the modern form, as they would express it, of the quip anticipating the French Revolution, après moi, le déluge. We’re back in the days in which entertainment and pornography replace scientific thought and poetry; in which drugs and rage replace bold ideas and the serenity necessary for truly creative thought.

So, unless you think about how you think, and whether you have the courage to think boldly and break out of your habits to contemplate big and fundamental conceptions of mankind and nature, they will have snared you, based on what you think now They think you cannot change, that you’ll stick to your habits locked in fear, that you’ll stick to our present paradigm, just as they have profiled you, just as they themselves are stuck.

Two monumental events interrupted this crafted and evolving propaganda scenario in the last week, now that reality has intruded. First, the President moved—as we have long called for—to declassify certain foundational documents in the coup itself. The Carter Page fourth FISA warrant application; the text messages of key figures in the Justice Department, including James Comey; the FD-302s involving Bruce Ohr and the FBI.

Second, George Papadopoulos. If you recall him, he’s the young Trump volunteer who suffered an endless series of entrapments on British soil, entrapments which actually involved collaboration between British intelligence, Barack Obama and John Brennan, set up to feed the FBI a fabricated story to create the contextual basis for investigating the President. This week, Papadopoulos, facing a sentence of only a month in prison at this point, began to describe the early phases of the British-orchestrated coup against Trump as he experienced it personally, beginning in April of 2016.

With these two events, the British have completely freaked out. According to the President’s own account, they complained heatedly. So, in all probability, did the entirety of his intelligence community. So, in all probability, did certain media figures—the trusted ones who have been the proud recipients of the drip, drip, drip torture of propaganda against the President. So did the compromised Gang of Eight in the Congress—the designated members of Congress who hear the intelligence community’s various insane versions of reality on a weekly basis.

You see, if this stuff comes out and is understood in all its implications by the American people, the coup is over. The people will fully understand that a foreign power, the British, acting in a conspiracy with a sitting President, Barack Obama, fabricated evidence against the President’s political rival, a candidate for President of the United States, Donald Trump. First, they tried to destroy Trump’s candidacy by painting him with the Russian agent brush; then they proceeded to try to destroy his Presidency by adding to the palette “sex freak,” “infantile man-child,” “savage racist,” “misogynist”—all the stuff you hear repeatedly.

When these documents come out, people will go to jail. The entirety of the corporate news media will go belly up. The professional class will have to just shut up and re-educate itself about our Constitutional and fundamental human values. And, I might add, Lyndon LaRouche will be exonerated. That is, if—and only if—our organization tells the story. Because we are really the only ones who can get this right, based on the vast library of knowledge Lyn has bequeathed to us to get this exactly right.

‘Submissive Void of an Uninformed Public’

As with Trump, the British demanded LaRouche’s head. As with Trump, they proceeded under a “counterintelligence” secret rubric to surveil and fabricate evidence. In LaRouche’s case, it was not under FISA, but under Executive Order 12333. As with Trump, they proceeded with a blunderbuss and illegal prosecution in which extant legal rules and precedents were completely abandoned, and associates of LaRouche stared at jail sentences lasting decades if they stuck with him and refused to become Judases.

The President has it somewhat right when he describes himself as a “stable genius.” That is, an agent of fundamental change. That is the type of person the British and their imperial predecessors target for absolute destruction. LaRouche, of course, is a much better and more able, stable genius because he acted to constantly expand his field of knowledge; he drove himself to make breakthrough after breakthrough in knowledge of the human mind and the physical universe; he acted on the principle of constant and progressive change—the enemy of any fixed social arrangement such as the present British Empire.

It is no accident that in the hideous National Defense Authorization Act, written by Obama holdovers but adopted by the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives who are seeking to subvert Trump, China and Russia are designated as “revisionist powers,” and we are told that that is what makes them our enemies. If you look up what “revisionist” means in this context, you will find that it means that they seek to “change the present order.” Change—the fundamental law of the actual universe, by anyone’s accurate epistemology. “That’s our enemy,” according to them. Think about that.

So, the battle is joined. As opposed to the propagandists who endlessly plough the President for flaws and present him in ways to ignite American’s most stupid and fixed passions, we can now make clear to people exactly what has happened to them over the last two decades. It is the British Empire, a modern feudal empire based on controlling the world’s monetary supply, rather than the landed aristocracy of old. It is an empire that conducts its wars through propaganda, through its ability to manipulate popular opinion and the popular mind. Its warfare goals were long ago set forth by Bertrand Russell—that is, convincing a labile population that snow is actually black.

John Pilger wrote a very good article in Consortium News recently, entitled “Hold the Front Page: The Reporters Are Missing,” which I recommend to you concerning the operations of the Empire. In it, he notes that in the 1970s he met Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s filmmaker, “whose propaganda mesmerized the German public.” According to Pilger, “She told me that the messages of her films were dependent not on ‘orders from above’ but on the submissive void of an uninformed public. ‘Did that include the liberal educated bourgeoisie?’ I asked. ‘Everyone,’ she said. Propaganda always wins if you allow it.”

Our Role

Our role here is not to meet lies with lies, but to present the truth and goad the population out of its fixed views and deadly preoccupations. We are aided by the tremendous progress being made in the world—the big and bold ideas encompassed in the Belt and Road, but otherwise presented in the most unvarnished form by this political movement. We are at the point where the enemy is clear to us and we can tell its story to its detriment. We are at the point where we can provide this great population with a real vision and, most fundamentally, real hope for the future. Among our most devastating weapons are music and poetry—the means to elevate and stimulate the human mind to live outside of its own perceived limitations, that is, to change.

For example, I have been thinking a lot recently about Shelley’s poem, the “Mask of Anarchy.” It is considered to be the greatest political poem ever written in the English language. It speaks of Empire based on the slaughter of peaceful protesters in Manchester, England by the British oligarchy in Shelley’s time. It paints a devastating picture and caricature of the people and traits involved in that slaughter—the oligarchs. For example, in thinking recently about Al Green, Kesha Rogers’ opponent in Texas, I thought Shelley’s description of fraud most apt. He says, as he lines up the allegorical traits which caused this massacre:

4.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,

Like Lord Eldon, an ermined gown;

His big tears, for he wept well,

Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

5.

And the little children, who

Round his feet played to and fro,

Thinking every tear a gem,

Had their brains knocked out by them.

What could be a more precise description of Al Green and the fate of the uneducated children who have been sucked in by the Resist movement? In his poem, Shelley moves from presenting his devastating caricature of the Empire, to that which will defeat it—the emboldened hope of a population educating itself and seeking, hungrily and aroused, justice itself, through, he says, science, and poetry, and thought. A population, I would add, whose thinking has been changed. The end of the poem has been cited widely all over the world many times:

91.

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number—

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you—

Ye are many—they are few.

Now is not the time to do a full study of this poem, but, I would submit, it should very much be our anthem and theme in the present moment.