This transcript appears in the October 9, 2020 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
[Print version of this transcript]
LAROUCHE PAC DIALOGUE
My Question Is: What Is Truth?
The following is the edited transcription of an interchange that took place between Anastasia Battle, a youth organizer, and a caller during the LaRouche Weekly Fireside Chat of October 1, 2020. The full webcast is available here.
Question: My name is Jack. I am a recent 2020 graduate, and I hate to say it, but I check both boxes: I am both stupid and incredibly disillusioned with the American system. It seems my disillusionment grows each day. My earliest memory was 9/11; that was my first memory. There’s been war my entire life. And, at first, I thought that war was fundamentally true, until I got old enough to learn about it and learned about World Trade Center Seven. But going further, I thought Christopher Columbus was a hero. I thought he was a patriot, until I learned that he left America in chains, and he was stripped of all of his noble titles when he got back to Spain.
I thought America was cool and definitively capitalist, until I learned about Woodrow Wilson “eminently domaining” everybody’s gold supply and creating Fort Knox and then raising the price of gold. That’s not a very free market. I thought America had a two-party system until I saw both parties clamp down on Trump when he tried to pull us out of wars and such. And I even believed that Donald Trump was chosen by the military to drain the swamp, and arrest the pedophiles, until none of that happened. The last straw for me was the debate [between Trump and Biden].
I want to be happy in life; I’m sure you all want to be happy. Neither of those men want to be happy; they want to be President. They don’t want us to be happy, they want us to vote for them. And they’ll do whatever it takes to get us to vote for them.
So, I guess I’m coming from a place of, I seek truth. I am disillusioned because I feel that many people my age don’t seek truth. And I don’t blame them for that, because the truth is ugly; the truth is terrible.
I guess my question is, what is truth? And how do we tell those who are not college-educated?
Anastasia Battle: I can give kind of an anecdote, which might be the best way I can describe it. When I was in high school, my AP Government class teacher asked the class—which is actually kind of ironic—“If there were a global pandemic, should the government take away a patent for a vaccine from a pharmaceutical company so they can get it out cheaply? Or, should they allow the pharmaceutical company to keep it, so they can sell it for a lot of money?”
Everybody in the room went one way or the other, and me in my happy little Greenie self, raised my hand and said, “Well, I don’t think that we should have the vaccine at all.” Everybody oohed and asked why. I said, “Well, I think the world is overpopulated, and that diseases were created to help with depopulation.”
My heart just sank when I said that, but nobody challenged me on that. I knew that it sounded terrible, and it was wrong; but nobody challenged me on that idea. I secretly told myself, “Well, I don’t want to say anything that extreme, but I’ll still be a Greenie.”
So, I went on through life, going to college, and then I ran into a LaRouche table. As I started coming around and talking with members of the LaRouche organization, people were challenging me on different parts of the science, and of course I had studied up on how to combat all those things, the science of it. And it wasn’t until somebody told me that “Look, the environmentalist movement has nothing to do with saving the environment. It has to do with killing people.” And I remembered what I had said.
The point of me bringing this up, is that I don’t think that people honestly don’t believe there’s any truth. I don’t know if you read that story, The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson. But all it takes is just one person to point out something. It’s usually ironic and helps you to reorganize what you’re thinking.
Just from talking with a lot of young people, when you take them through an idea like that, explicitly on the Greenie stuff, that’s always pretty fun. Some of them get pretty heated. But when you actually see somebody make that connection, you can see the idea spark in their eyes, and they say, “Oh, so you’re saying that I don’t have to take a position that’s given to me. I can think of something completely different of what this issue actually is.”
I think that that’s how we can approach this problem that we’re having in the United States with this party stuff, or the people who attack Trump. When I say they attack Trump, they’re just outright insane. Or the people who are just going to support Trump, no matter what. I’m not saying it’s not OK to be a Trump supporter, but we have to actually think about what policies we need for the nation, and to change the dynamic so those things can happen.
Does that get at something that you’re—
Jack: It really does. I think this simple—it’s kind of what you mentioned. It feels to me that every single issue for the past four years has been this dichotomous binary. Are you for a wall, or against? Or everything. But I like that you don’t have to pick a side. I think that alone is enough for me. I appreciate that response.
And also, what you said kind of addressed a feeling of intuition, where you said nobody challenged you when you said something that you felt. I guess what I was getting at was, young people feel disillusioned; we just don’t know where to take it, so we vote for Kanye or something. But I like that you don’t have to pick a binary, because it’s all wrong.
Battle: Exactly.
