Opinion | Analysis
On April 29, Pocono Review published two articles about the Central Park playground. The first documented how Honesdale Borough tore out a children’s playground on an unfinished verbal report from a paid consultant they told the public was a volunteer — and never told parents the DEP cleared the soil. The second documented who was behind it. It ran under the headline: Same Bed. Same Board. Same Foundation.
That headline named what the documents showed: the mayor’s domestic partner, Lisa Glover, sits on the board of the organization whose paid consultant produced the soil report that took the playground out. She designed the replacement. It fundraises through her partner’s employer. None of it was disclosed.
The Photograph
He didn’t call a press conference or a public meeting. He made a Facebook post sitting in his bed. Lisa Glover was the photographer — or at least that’s what she said in the comments of the same Facebook post. In bed, Derek sat reading a local history book — “Honesdale’s Early Years.” But there was another book there. A more infamous one that I believe Derek thinks we’re all too stupid to see for ourselves.
That book is Propaganda, published in 1928 by Edward Bernays.
Derek was betting most people in Honesdale have never heard of it. He was wrong. Enough people recognized that book and immediately understood the significance. We’d like to take a moment to thank our eagle-eyed readers for the find.
The Book
Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, a World War I government propagandist, and the architect of the American public relations industry. Propaganda is his manual. It opens like this:
“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, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
Bernays wasn’t embarrassed by this. He considered it a public service. His argument, across eleven chapters, is that the average person cannot be trusted to evaluate complex questions — that democracy only functions because an intelligent minority manages public opinion on everyone else’s behalf. The masses need to be guided. They just can’t know they’re being guided.
He called it “engineering consent.”
The Message
This is the book Derek Williams put in his photograph. Not behind him. Not in a stack. Propped up. Spine out. Facing you.
The photograph was his response to a headline that put him and Lisa Glover in the same sentence — same bed, same board, same foundation. So he took a picture of his bed. With her quilt on it. With her lamp shade beside it. And in front of it all, a book whose core argument is that people like you can’t be trusted to figure out what people like him are doing.
That isn’t an accident. That’s a message — just not to you. To the handful of people in his orbit who recognize the book, it reads as a signal. A wink. I know what I’m doing. I know you know. To everyone else, it’s a mayor in a cozy bedroom defending his girlfriend’s honor.
A slap to your face disguised as a bedside photograph.
The Playbook
This is a recognizable story. The local kid who leaves for university, acquires credentials, and comes back. Who gets indoctrinated into believing that the uneducated small-town people back home don’t know what they don’t know. Who returns convinced it’s up to him to lead them — because they’re too dumb to do it themselves.
It doesn’t announce itself. It looks like civic engagement. It looks like someone who cares deeply about his town. It looks like walking for mayor.
In Chapter Three, Bernays describes how effective propagandists don’t look like propagandists. They look like community leaders. They look like the person you’d stop on the sidewalk to talk to. Their power comes precisely from the fact that no one is watching for it.
Williams ran on walking. On listening. On being the guy you meet on the sidewalk. His campaign slogan was literally “Walking for Mayor.” There were no hard policy commitments that could be held against him. The warmth was the platform. Read the book yourself and try to tell me his entire campaign isn’t straight out of the Bernays playbook.
His Facebook post called this outlet’s reporter an “anonymous robot pseudonym” generating “uncertainty around community development projects.” It said the reporting contained “factual inaccuracies and obvious misrepresentations.” It named none. It praised the volunteers. It ended with a toast to the people who “build things up, bridge differences, and work together.”
That is the Bernays move. You don’t address the substance. You reframe who the audience should trust. You make the reporter the story. You position yourself as the community’s defender against an outside threat. You give people an identity to choose — neighbor versus outsider, warmth versus attack — so they don’t have to evaluate the documents.
It works when the audience doesn’t know what book is on the bed.
What Honesdale Deserves
The people of Honesdale deserve a mayor who thinks they’re capable of handling documented facts about how their borough government operates. Who answers Right-to-Know requests. Who discloses that his employer sent $171,500 to an organization where his domestic partner sits on the board. Who explains why the borough manager co-founded the playground project before she was hired.
What they got instead was a photograph.
A warm lamp. A handmade quilt. A book about how to guide people who will never know they’re being guided.
Spine out. Facing the camera. Placed there on purpose, for an audience he didn’t expect would recognize it.
He was wrong about that.
Read the original reporting: Honesdale Central Park & The Bookstore Soil Scientist | Same Bed. Same Board. Same Foundation.
Send tips to tips@poconoreview.com. Correction requests to corrections@poconoreview.com.