This collection of inspiring speeches by Emanuel Pastreich from his fearless campaign for president in the 2024 election touches on literally every critical aspect of the crisis faced by the United States. Pastreich suggests, quite literally, that the only meaningful medicine for such the spiritual and institutional illness our nation suffers from as a republic possessed by the evil spirits of ancient empires, is the bitter tonic known as truth. A glance at just a page of this book will make it obvious to the most casual reader why Emanuel Pastreich was able to garner such support even as he refused to take a penny from corporations, billionaires, and lobbyists, even as he spoke the truth about 9.11, the Federal Reserve, and operation COVID-19 to a degree that other candidates did not dare do even in their guarded luxurious homes. Pastreich writes,
"We face together similar challenges at the political, the economic, the cultural, and the spiritual levels. The pressures and the threats seem overwhelming at times because the traditions in America we thought were made of solid marble have grown soft and mushy beneath our feet in a culture of indulgence and greed. But for all the hypocrisy and selfishness that sadly blinds our neighbors, our friends, and even our families, we can sense that truth and justice are leading us forward even as our foes seem so overwhelming.
The truth is, as I heard it said somewhere, that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you and it waits for you to unlock it and thereby to transform our nation. What is required is the bravery to confront the truth, the compassion to find commonalities with our neighbors, the righteousness to stand up for what is decent even when the corrupt and sick is promoted everywhere, the tenacity to carry on the battle for months, years, and decades until those who were blind start to see what we stand for, and the decisiveness to realize today what others thought will take centuries.
We Americans will not let this nation be reduced to a moral wasteland.
We will not allow a handful of the rich to employ banks of supercomputers, running sophisticated algorithms, to manipulate and to dumb down our people, to use hidden persuaders in movies and dramas that induce narcissism and self-centeredness in our children, to run mass media campaigns to distract us from the current crisis by obsessing over the insignificant, to fabricate financial crises that destroy our lives, nor will we allow them to launch false-flag operations that will herd us into a Gaza of the soul.
We will not permit them to wall us in on all sides with economic bankruptcy, institutional collapse, cultural banality, spiritual depravity, intellectual barbarism, or physical slavery.
We will not follow the cardboard messiahs that they have prepared carefully for us backstage, nor will we use the flawed logic they feed to us through their public intellectuals and talk shows so to confuse us, nor will we fall for the cultural, racial, or identity conflicts that they have stirred up in order to divide us against each other.
Nothing will stop us from coming together, e pluribus unum, coming together to build a new nation, one that is built up from the basement of solid moral fiber, that follows exactly the plans that we have all agreed on; a mansion for the people that is built, not out of money and debt, not out of pornography, social media, and games, not out of weapons systems and surveillance technology, not out of offshore trusts and billionaire funds, but built out of the stuff of the human soul, and build by our people, each and every one of us, gathering together to write a new contract which binds us together as equal partners for the common good within a new nation state that follows the spirit and the word of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."
Author Biography:
Emanuel Pastreich has emerged over the last two decades as the leading voice for rationality and science in domestic policy, in diplomacy, and in security, someone who stresses long-term planning and advocates for addressing the real social, cultural, economic, technological and environmental dangers we face at home and abroad, not those cooked up by think tanks and consulting firms taking orders from private equity. Pastreich set himself apart in the 2020 presidential election as the only candidate focused on the COVID-19 operation, 9/11 truth, the threat of climate and biodiversity collapse, the use of IT, nano and bio technologies to manipulate and destroy human society, the exponential concentration of wealth, the push for enslavement of the citizens by the super-rich, and the for-profit arms race.
Pastreich refused from the start to take money from the rich and powerful, and he was not discouraged that the corrupt media ignored his carefully crafted speeches and policy proposals. He considers the truth to be the most powerful weapon in his arsenal, one that must be articulated by a nation-wide movement-- not a corrupt political party or a public intellectual promoted by dark forces behind the curtains.
Pastreich frequently quotes the philosopher Hannah Arendt when he describes his mission in this presidential campaign,
"Evil is never 'radical;' it is only extreme. It possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. Evil defies thought because when thought tries to go to the roots of evil, it is frustrated, finding nothing there. That is the 'banality' of evil."
That is to say that he wishes to take on evil, but that he will not promote simplistic blame games, or allow the crafty to play one group of citizens against another using religion, ethnicity, or ideological coloration to divide and confuse.
Pastreich is committed to reviving the traditions of internationalism, NOT globalism, and of a democratic economy that were pursued by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Eugene Debs, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, and John F. Kennedy in their writings and actions.
He demands that the trillions given to multinational banks and corporations over the last ten years be returned, that conglomerates like Amazon and Facebook be run as regulated cooperatives, and that the assets of fossil fuel corporations be seized immediately, and their owners and administrators charged for the criminal action of presenting fraudulent information to the government and to the people concerning the catastrophic damage to the environment resulting from their products.
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, raised in Saint Louis, Missouri, Pastreich attended Lowell High School in San Francisco. He graduated from Yale College in 1987 in the major of Chinese literature and spent a year at National Taiwan University. His obtained his master's degree from University of Tokyo and his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University.
Pastreich started his career at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor, arguing that Americans must have a sophisticated understanding of Asia in order to respond to the challenges of the 21st century.
He currently serves as president of the Asia Institute, a think tank focused on diplomacy, security and technology with offices in Washington D.C., Seoul, and Tokyo. He is the only American politician who is fluent in Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
