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June 21, 2025 65 mins

Reality with Bruce de Torres 64

Gerald Pechenuk: LaRouche, Activism, and Trump

Gerald Pechenuk is a long-time supporter of the Lyndon LaRouche movement and activist who has been a candidate in Democratic and Republican primaries, done campaign coordination for over 500 citizen-candidates in a dozen states in the Midwest, and created content for LaRouche-affiliated platforms.

Gerald has also been a key player in California’s MAGA movement since 2022 and is an elected member of the Alameda County Republican Party Central Committee and a delegate to the California GOP State Convention. Learn more at PrometheanAction.com and CaliforniaMAGA.com.

Summary

Seeing Lee Harvey Oswald, surrounded by police, killed on live TV in 1963 caused Gerald and many Americans to doubt the veracity of our government and media. Lyndon LaRouche, when Gerald discovered him, had explanations that made sense.

When 12-years-old Gerald learned about nuclear fusion at 1964 World’s Fair in New York City. During the turmoil of the times, he thought, “Why are we fighting when we could have unlimited energy and this great future?” He decided that he was going to help people stop fighting and discuss what we all want (a good life, a healthy life, a productive life).

Not drafted by the military’s lottery system, lucky Gerald joined the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Democratic-leaning peace movement (inspired by the likes of Eugene McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy, and George McGovern).

And that’s where he ran into Lyndon LaRouche, who was active at Columbia University and other schools up and down the East Coast. He was revealing the players behind the scenes, like the Ford Foundation and similar institutions that were funding the drugs, the legalization, the so-called hippie lifestyle. Gerald stuck with LaRouche because he had the best verifiable explanations and answers for what was happening. Gerald: “To make the world a better place, to be part of the solution, you have to be part of a movement. You have to take your passion, your ideas, out into the world.”

Author Anton Chaitkin ran for mayor of New York City in the 1970s. LaRouche ran for president. “We raised our own money. We had our own news service. We had our own candidates.” LaRouche was invited into the Democratic Party. He was revealing the real powers behind the scenes (the Council on Foreign Relations, etc.).

In New Hampshire in 1980, Ronald Reagan started using LaRouche’s material, talking about the Trilateral Commission, which was represented by George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s opponent for the Republican nomination. Reagan won and felt he owed LaRouche’s people something because they had supplied with much that helped him overcome the Eastern Liberal Establishment that Bush represented.

LaRouche was invited to give suggestions and proposals to Reagan as he prepared to be sworn in. One of them became SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative. And LaRouche was given clearance and made the back channel to the Soviets, offering to share the technology with them. That’s what Reagan wanted to do, with the goal of eliminating much of the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union.

When Reagan was in Iceland to meet with Gorbachev of the Soviet Union in 1986, with SDI an issue on the table, the LaRouche office in Virginia was raided by 400 federal agents. Arrests were made and LaRouche was later charged with a crime, which was really, according to Gerald, the fact that LaRouche had gotten a policy approved by the President of the United States (the Strategic Defense Initiative) through completely independent means, no deals with big shots, no coverage by the mainstream media. And that had to be squashed and hard.

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