This article contains several wonderful hyperlinks, so please go to the primary link and take advantage of those. Every contemporary outrage of our day is covered herein. Catholics understand FEAR as a temptation and a threat to our soul when we do not have it under the control of our rational faculties and our faith in God. When we get fear under control, we can use it as tool for the good of our soul and the common good of our fellow man. The continued operation of Brother Andre's monastery is under threats from the diocese in today's "novus ordo" "Catholic" milieu.

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...https://catholicism.org/ad-rem-no-37...eid=742807bb3d...

Resist Fear Mongering Propaganda

Jul 8, 2020 Brother André Marie

This Sunday’s Epistle reading concluded with the following verse and a half: “And be not afraid of their fear, and be not troubled. But sanctify the Lord Christ in your hearts” (I Pet. 3:14-15a). The words that I have emboldened from the first of Christ’s Vicars are words that we should meditate on to see our way through the challenges of these days, for we are living in a regime of fear, and fear can be a powerful tool of manipulation in the hands of our enemies. As a result, many people are terribly “troubled.”

Saint Peter’s words struck me yesterday in a way that they never had before. Strangely enough, I was prepared for them by a visit to the chiropractor. About to walk out of his office (a bit better than when I walked in!), I had the strange experience of shaking his hand and then expressing relief that he was not “social distancing.” This became an ice-breaker that led him to relate an instructive anecdote: Someone representing the city approached him and other business owners with the request that they take a “pledge” to observe certain Covid-19-inspired safety recommendations from the CDC and the State of New Hampshire. The chiropractor demurred, telling the person who approached him, “I would rather not contribute to spreading fear.”

From that visit on Thursday till Sunday, I thought a lot about how this entire Covid-19 PSYOP — the largest exercise in social engineering in the history of the world — depends upon fear, fear surrounding an “invisible enemy” you are led to believe lurks everywhere, but especially on other people, with the seemingly miraculous exception of large-scale, cheek-by-jowl riots brought to you by the professional Marxist agitants of Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

Fear is one of the eleven passions, which are divided into the six concupiscible passions: love, hate, desire, aversion, joy, sorrow; and the five irascible passions: hope, despair, daring, fear, and anger. These passions are good servants but poor masters since they should always be under the control of reason, just as reason itself must be conformed to the natural and supernatural Law of God. As a gift of the Holy Ghost, fear has a very valuable and necessary place in our spiritual life (see “Fear, Holy and Unholy”); and, even as a passion or emotion, it can be used to our advantage. But, like all our emotions, the passion of fear can be manipulated by our visible and invisible enemies to our detriment.

As Dr. E. Michael Jones has shown in scholarly detail in his book, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control, the disordered desire for venereal pleasure is also a powerful tool for control. Perhaps the passion of fear is not quite that effective, but I venture that it is at least a close second. There is also a similarity in the way the two passions can be manipulated for control; so, looking at control and manipulation through the lens of one can give insights into how the other might be used. Used in tandem, as they are, fear and lust can be a devastating combination.

There are certain people whose manipulative techniques resemble the methods of the demons. A case in point is the late Jeffrey Epstein, who has come roaring back into the headlines thanks the arrest of his accused partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell. She was taken into FBI custody last week here in New Hampshire, less than an hour and a half distance from where I am now writing. According to Epstein’s victims, Maxwell was the vixen who recruited and groomed underaged females for abuse by that reptilian predator. Aside from his own personal sins against these troubled girls, Mr. Epstein also used them as “honey pots,” i.e., bait to entrap the powerful people who frequented his Caribbean island and his private jet (dubbed “the Lolita Express”). This is how he resembled the demons: by getting “the goods” on those powerful people who frequented his bordello, he could extort favors from them. In other words, he controlled them by manipulating their vices — in this case through the crass method of having blackmail material furnished by cameras hidden in the “private” rooms of his pleasure palace. The demons, of course, are not interested in blackmail per se, but they do exert control over us by manipulating our vices. The less we are under the sway of vice, the less control they have over us.

Specific to fear, I will point out one last thing about Mr. Epstein. It is obvious that he not only manipulated lust, but also fear. “Honeypot operations” are not only the stuff of movies; they have long been used by intelligence agencies: American, Russian, Israeli, etc. (at least one account has it that Epstein and Maxwell were both working with the Mossad which would not be terribly difficult to believe). Sometimes it is an espionage recruiting tool, sometimes it is plain old blackmail. But consider it from Epstein’s angle. He wants favors from powerful people who are in his pocket as a result of the goods he has on them. A conversation ensues: “It would be a shame if your wife found out, Senator… about those photos, I mean. Please do me this favor, and your secret’s safe with me!” That is not only the manipulation of lust, but also of fear. Even if the Senator’s wife already knows that she married a rake, no doubt his political opponents would find the revelations handy to use against him if they became news. The journalists ready to get dirt from “informed sources” are legion.

It is an aside, but given the moral caliber of most of the swamp dwellers in the District of Columbia, why should we be surprised that so much evil and so little good comes out of the place? Such blackmail and manipulation is common there. The reader may note that I am going very thin on supporting links in these two paragraphs. It is not for want of material; I simply do not want to bring attention to the prurient details.

Back to fear. Richard Gunderman’s article, “The Manipulation of the American Mind: Edward Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations,” has very much to tell us. Because it gives so much insight into the way we are manipulated by propaganda, I will quote from Gunderman’s article at some length. (Its subject is discussed in much more detail in the above-mentioned book by Dr. E. Michael Jones.)

Near the beginning of the article, Gunderman quotes Bernays’ own frank and almost unbelievable words from his “seminal work,” the 1928 book, Propaganda:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

Gunderman goes on:

Bernays came by his beliefs honestly. Born in Austria in 1891, the year Sigmund Freud published one of his earliest papers, Bernays was also Freud’s nephew twice over. His mother was Freud’s sister Anna, and his father, Ely Bernays, was the brother of Freud’s wife Martha.

The year after his birth, the Bernays family moved to New York, and Bernays later graduated from Cornell with a degree in agriculture. But instead of farming, he chose a career in journalism, eventually helping the Woodrow Wilson Administration promote the idea that US efforts in World War I were intended to bring democracy to Europe. …

Having seen how effective propaganda could be during war, Bernays wondered whether it might prove equally useful during peacetime.

Yet propaganda had acquired a somewhat pejorative connotation (which would be further magnified during World War II), so Bernays promoted the term “public relations.”

Drawing on the insights of his Uncle Sigmund — a relationship Bernays was always quick to mention — he developed an approach he dubbed “the engineering of consent.” He provided leaders the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.” To do so, it was necessary to appeal not to the rational part of the mind, but the unconscious.

The “unconscious,” keep in mind, is Uncle Sigmund’s “id,” which Dr. Jones says is synonymous with the passions. So, Bernays is “engineering consent” by manipulating people’s passions. Keep in mind that this became the tried-and-true methodology in the 1920’s! If anything, it has been refined since then.

Continuing with Gunderman:

Bernays acquired an impressive list of clients, ranging from manufacturers such as General Electric, Procter & Gamble, and the American Tobacco Company, to media outlets like CBS and even politicians such as Calvin Coolidge. To counteract President Coolidge’s stiff image, Bernays organized “pancake breakfasts” and White House concerts with Al Jolson and other Broadway performers. With Bernays’ help, Coolidge won the 1924 election.

Bernays’ publicity campaigns were the stuff of legend. To overcome “sales resistance” to cigarette smoking among women, Bernays staged a demonstration at the 1929 Easter parade, having fashionable young women flaunt their “torches of freedom.”

He promoted Lucky Strikes by convincing women that the forest green hue of the cigarette pack was among the most fashionable of colors. The success of this effort was manifested in innumerable window displays and fashion shows.

In the 1930s, he promoted cigarettes as both soothing to the throat and slimming to the waistline. But at home, Bernays was attempting to persuade his wife to kick the habit. When [he] would find a pack of her Parliaments in their home, he would snap every one of them in half and throw them in the toilet. While promoting cigarettes as soothing and slimming, Bernays, it seems, was aware of some of the early studies linking smoking to cancer.

Bernays used the same techniques on children. To convince kids that bathing could be fun, he sponsored soap sculpture competitions and floating contests. These were designed to prove that Ivory bars were more buoyant than competing products." ...

End of Part 1 of 2