On May 7, The New York Times ran an article comparing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to independent candidates in past elections like Ross Perot in 1992, Gary Johnson in 2016, and John Anderson in 1980, who functioned as spoilers or gave people the option of a protest vote.^[1]

Previous Times pieces on the upcoming 2024 election mentioned Cornel West and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, though noted their low polling numbers compared to RFK Jr.

The Times has completely ignored the independent candidacy of Emanuel Pastreich, a literary scholar from Nashville, Tennessee, with a Harvard Ph.D. and senior fellow at the Global Peace Foundation, who has written more than a dozen books, including some in Japanese, Chinese and Korean.

The central plank of Pastreich’s platform is to stanch the moral decay in the U.S. and to “reinvent government, not as a PR gimmick funded by corporations, or as a gateway for contractors in search of profits, but as something that protects the welfare of the people and defends those who oppose the powerful.”

According to Pastreich, “[t]he radical concentration of wealth, the catastrophic collapse of our environment, and the foolish drive for militarism as a road to riches, these crimes are not even considered as topics for discussion in polite company today. Those who are supposed to lead us, prefer rather to wrap themselves in a blanket woven of cowardice and hypocrisy, and to ape the honored practice of the three monkeys.”

Pastreich, who ran for president in 2020 lacks the Kennedy name, wealth, connections or funding base, though his campaign could gain traction if people heed his message.

In a poignant article that he wrote on Substack, Pastreich reflected on the treason of American intellectuals trained like himself at elite universities like Harvard and Yale who used that education as a “special key to an elite club” rather than as an “obligation to serve society, to stand up bravely for the interests of the nation, and above all for the interests of those who have not had the opportunity to learn how the system works.”

Speaking to his fellow Harvard classmates whom he considers thoughtful and insightful men and women, Pastreich wrote that “you were given special tools that few had access to. They were given to you so that you could use them, use them to help society, especially in times of need, in times of crisis. And yes, that moment of crisis inevitably came. The 2000 election came, a moment when the entire federal government was taken over by multinational corporations and a handful of the wealthy. I looked around and my colleagues and friends acted as if nothing had happened. They took the fictions of The New York Times as their gospel and clung ever tighter to their privileges.”

Pastreich continued: “Then came the collapse of the twin towers, the last card in the Tarot deck, a modern miracle that belongs the Book of Revelations. In other words, a massive fraud that any high school student who has taken a semester of physics could see through. And yet again, my colleagues from Yale and Harvard were silent; in many cases, they appeared at think tank seminars, on television, to promote this blatant fiction, and to use it as a justification for endless foreign wars, for the transfer of wealth to the billionaires. It was, sadly, nothing other than the treason of the intellectuals.

I know that the billionaires were ultimately behind this, using their pawns and pets, but if the intellectuals, the upstanding members of society who have the specialized knowledge, the ability to write effectively, and the confidence to use those skills, if they had not sided with the establishment, if they had asked the most basic questions, the drive for war into Afghanistan, into Iraq, into Syria, and into another dozen nations, ending at the doorsteps of Russia and China, that downwards spiral could never have started.”

Below is the transcript of an interview that Pastreich conducted with Ian Carpenter of LiveONE.tv:

Ian Carpenter:

“You’re watching LiveONE.tv from New York with our coverage of the 2024 presidential election. We get to speak with candidate for president Emanuel Pastreich who is the president of the Asia Institute in Washington, D.C., Seoul and Tokyo.”

Emanuel Pastreich:

“It’s a great pleasure to be here with you, especially at this incredibly important historical moment for the United States when things are falling apart both globally and domestically—not by coincidence–at the same time. I’m honored to have a chance to speak to everybody today.

I was originally a professor at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where I taught Japanese culture. I am unique among presidential candidates in that I speak Japanese, Korean and Chinese. I made a declaration of candidacy for president as an independent in February 2020. I lasted in the United States for two weeks and was forced to move to Korea. I continued my campaign in Korea throughout the whole Covid regime and came back to the U.S. in December 2022. I’m in Tokyo right now but I’ll be in the U.S. tomorrow. I ran in the Green Party for the presidential nomination last September, Cornel West and I were the only two candidate who had websites and who were registered with the FEC. I was blocked from the start. The Green Party refused to mention me in any of their formal materials, but kept marketing Cornel West. I was also ignored by the media, that is the alternative media, and by Dr. West as well. 

After one month in the Green Party with broad support, but unable to raise any funds or get any coverage, I decided that this was not worth the trouble. However, I have a lot of friends in the Green Party, specifically in the Green Liberty Caucus which works to build bridges between progressive and libertarian/conservative groups. We were quite successful because we were willing to discuss state crimes. That is a topic many so-called “progressives” who don’t have many bones in their body avoid.

Those progressives in the Green Party, they use a sort of progressive, inclusive language as a way to sort of put a velvet glove on a steel fist. And that attitude in the Green Party was, for Green Liberty, just unacceptable. If we don’t take on state crimes, none of this identity politics is going to mean much.”

Ian Carpenter:

“Please do continue. I feel that we’re zeroing on what is essential. I appreciate it. So important for the people to know that it is not as if there aren’t any candidates out there but the whole system is so completely rigged that it’s impossible to get off the ground.”

Emanuel Pastreich:

“Maybe I could say a word about how it works. There are two sort of tiers to it. The first is if you’re saying something which the powers that be don’t want to have heard. I tend to violate that rule by stressing the three truths: 9-11 truth, COVID-19 truth and Federal Reserve truth. The last is how we counterfeit trillions of dollars and then launder the money through the Pentagon, or other means which have expanded to include all parts of the federal government. So if you address any of these three truths, even indirectly, then you’re not going to be able to raise any money. You can’t play on the standard field. You can’t get on TV. You will not be invited to events. And even the so-called ‘truth tellers,’ who are for the most part limited hangout, are not going to engage with you.

But there’s another level to it. There are specific programs for you that are primarily Homeland Security programs. Homeland Security has a series of anti-disinformation budgets. These are used largely by private contractors. People say it’s the government, but it’s not government. It’s Booz Allen Hamilton or CASI—and there is now a whole range of these firms, including many Israeli firms. They have the Homeland Security budgets, and their job is not necessarily to kill you, or to threaten you, but just to make sure that you’re not going to go anywhere.

They’ll throw people to be your supporters who will then stab you in the back or they’ll block you out of social media or do other things. Or you’d be on YouTube and 10,000 people will see your video, but the YouTube will indicate just three. Things like that, low-level, low-intensity, including lawfare and harassment. That is the field where Israel is the king of the hill these days.

Israel has developed sophisticated forms of interference. Gaza is the great laboratory for testing new systems. That is why I was disappointed with Cornel West for only stressing how in Gaza Israelis are killing the Palestinians. That is the truth. I don’t deny that. But Gaza is more than that. It is ultimately an experiment, a test bed for using various forms of surveillance, tracking, intelligence convergence, and the use of drones, robots, and a variety of other technologies (nano and bio weapons that haven’t been disclosed to the public) to systematically kill people off. At the beginning of the Gaza operation. I believe the IDF selected 20,000 people in Gaza who they were going to kill, and they put their data in the supercomputers, and then they killed them all over the period of three months. The point about this technology is that this could be your neighborhood in a couple of years.

Once they have perfected the technology, people around the world are interested in buying it from Israeli vendors. They will use that technology in your neighborhood, in Arkansas, in Texas, in our neighborhood. The very unfortunate blending together of the United States and Israel, and to some degree also the UK, has formed this information-military-industrial-financial cluster.”

Ian Carpenter:

“I’m right with you Emanuel. I find it disgusting. We have some materials on someone who was harassed by Stratfor, one of the players, and also General Dynamics—together with another person on Twitter X named “Politics Out of California.” We exposed a guy named Pre-Rack Josie, and I reported him to the police. I filed a police report for cyber stalking and submitted it to Congressman Troy Nehls down in Texas, where this group, working with General Dynamics, operates.”

Emanuel Pastreich:

“General Dynamics is one of the big players. I gave a recent talk about Larry Ellison and Oracle. Oracle is one of the biggest criminal syndicates out there globally. And the way Oracle works is also true for General Dynamics or Microsoft, Amazon and others. They take over the government. People imagine a coup d’état would be men with guns who suddenly seize power. And that is the mythology surrounding the January 6th incident, which was 60/40 mix of truth and fiction; but that’s not what’s going on now.

The real coup d’état consists of outsourcing the functions of government, starting with the forced digitalization and online formatting of government functions, and then the outsourcing of those functions to companies like Amazon and Oracle. Those multinational corporations, incorporated offshore which pay virtually no taxes, unaccountable to the citizens, then essentially run all communications, control all information, in government and, at the same time, lobby for what policy should be from the outside.

They’ve taken over the government. And this is the point I really want to stress for the American people. People ask, why support someone like me who’s not on the ballot in any state at this point? I think the answer is quite simple. I stand in contrast to Cornel West, or for that matter Joe Biden, or Robert Kennedy who are telling you, ‘Vote for me, otherwise we’re going to be living in a totalitarian state. Otherwise, it will be the end of democracy.’

They are lying to you. Democracy has been in a coffin for quite a long time. We’re not trying to defend democracy. We’re trying to re-establish the rule of law and accountability in the United States as a first step toward democratic rule in the future.

Forget about the self-deception and just ask ourselves, ‘how do we go from totalitarian rule with a couple limited hangout oases, a political Disneyland where you have some fun, and establish accountable government that has the interests of the people as its purpose, that is as transparent as possible.

That’s the cycle that we’re hoping to start. Supporting me, even if I’m not on the ballot, means a lot because it means you’re actually demanding accountable government, and not accepting the fantasy marketed by Wall Street.”

Ian Carpenter:

“Sometimes people don’t recognize the power of a write-in ballot. You would be a write-in candidate. Absolutely. I am right with you there. I submitted a lawsuit to the Attorney General in New York Eric Schneiderman. I did so on behalf of the lawyers for Ron Paul. We insisted that they, because New York has a write-in ballot, count the votes. But they don’t count them.

If you read the Supreme Court ruling from the Voting Rights Act, an extension of the Civil Rights Act, it says that everybody has a right to vote their conscience without threat, intimidation or coercion. A very important part of that law is and that everyone’s vote must be counted. Ron Paul’s people were putting out write-in ballots in states and they weren’t counting them.”

Emanuel Pastreich:

“We have to look at both sides of the equation. On the one hand, obviously, we want to have the right to vote, to have votes count, and to have a transparent system for electing people following the Constitution. At the same time, we have to go back to the Declaration of Independence, which declares, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce citizens under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”

As we demand that elections are transparent and fair, we must also establish close relations with each other, yourself and myself, self-support, self-help, groups to build up from the ground up independent citizens’ groups which can then claim to be following the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Over time, these groups that we form will be able to then go to the federal government. say at Homeland Security—this is our little shout-out for our friends at Homeland Security who are there listening and whom we assume are not our opponents—and say, ‘We represent the people in that we’re following the Constitution. We are the ones standing up for the long-term interests of the citizens of the United States.’

The resistance must be built up economically, but also spiritually and ideologically through independent thinking. We will go to the people who call themselves ‘Homeland Security’ or ‘Department of Defense,’ or ‘Department of Treasury,’ and we will say to them, ‘We follow the Constitution; We follow the Declaration of Independence. These documents define what is and is not the United States, what is and what is not the government. If you guys call yourselves Homeland Security, but you are run by for-profit corporations, and everything you’re doing goes against the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, then, legally, you’re not government. When the government is outsourced to Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Cisco, then, you guys are not the government.’

The first step is to say it. Obviously, most of these overpaid bureaucrats and corporate types are going to laugh their heads off. But if you do it strategically and effectively, and with sufficient bravery and determination, then there will be a subtle shift, reaching a point at which the question of where the legitimacy lies, who is the constitutional government in the United States come into play. Then we get real change, real fundamental change.

Sadly, in the case of the Donald Trump campaign we see a partial effort to address state crimes. There are people like me who support Donald Trump in good faith.

But sadly, Donald Trump is the invention of a group of billionaire cronies, Robert Mercer and Sheldon Adelson, Peter Thiel and others. They are making the decisions, not ‘pro-wrestler gone MAGA’ Donald Trump, and they are putting out this story that Trump is going to take on the “deep state,” re-establish democracy, get rid of all these foreign powers, and end the dangerous trade and financial treaties.

But it’s just a show. The decisions are made based on the bottom line of a group of billionaires. There will be a real fight, with blood on the streets, but it will not be between the suppressed masses and elite, but rather between different groups of billionaires who have different interests and who manipulate common people.

There are billionaires who control natural resources: gas, oil, mining; billionaires who dominate transportation and logistics; billionaires who control real estate; finance and speculation billionaires who shuffle around hedge funds and derivatives and all that garbage; IT billionaires, entertainment and education billionaires, etc.  

There is a real struggle. We should not underestimate how far they will go; they’re willing to kill each other. But this is a struggle between different breeds of billionaires with different interests. It’s not a struggle between we the people and the oligarchs.”

Ian Carpenter:

What do we need to do to fight real tyranny? It sounds like worse than stories I heard about Joseph Stalin.”

Emanuel Pastreich:

“That’s where we are today. I’m reminded of the story of a Byzantine emperor, His adviser said to him, ‘The world is all against you, Emperor.’ And the emperor replied, ‘No, I’m against the world.’ The fundamental aspect of the battle is attitude.  

If you assume the position that a group of one or two, or 10, or 100, taking a stand against a corrupt and illegitimate system is legitimate, then that action can be transformative.

The most obvious example of such an action is the Warsaw ghetto uprising. A relatively small number of people took on the entire fascist system and they fought it out for five days; almost all of them were killed. The fact that they were able to take that stand transformed the entire environment in Europe in 1943. And after that stand you started to see resistance popping up all over Central and Eastern Europe against the fascists. At the time Europe was basically fascist. It wasn’t just the Germans. The uprising itself was not successful militarily, but it changed the environment.

That’s the point of my campaign. To change things, we need at least a couple of people who stand up. That stand will be modeled and replicated elsewhere.

The other example is the stand of John Brown on the issue of slavery. I talk a lot about slavery in my speeches, and it is not just a matter of what happened to African-Americans in the past and the consequences today—although that part is very real. Slavery is the agenda now; we’re being turned into slaves slowly using IT and entertainment to dumb us down and corporations and the universities they control are restricting what jobs are and how we get them. Access to capital for ordinary people has been radically restricted in recent years so working people can’t get loans.

The agenda is to turn us into slaves, making sure we never organize meaningful resistance and the transformation goes slowly, and back and forth, so most people cannot figure out what is happening until the net is cast.

This development is no mystery. If you get a certain degree of concentration of wealth in any society, we reach a threshold in terms of concentration assets, then you are heading for a slave society.

This has been true for the last 10,000 years. In the resistance to slavery back in 1859, John Brown and his group went to Harpers Ferry. He could only gather together a small number of people to follow him [around 22]. At dawn on October 17, 1859, they seized the federal armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry and declared a provisional government.

Brown said that slavery was not a ‘peculiar institution,’ but an act of war against the citizens of the United States, and that it had to stop immediately. Following the Constitution, Brown and his followers established their own provisional government, declaring, ‘we don’t recognize your slavery-based exploitative parasitical institutions as government.’ Now, Brown’s uprising was put down immediately. During his trial, he was very eloquent. People from across the country wrote to him saying how moved they were that someone was interested in action.”

The uprising was a failure, but transformed the country. After that event, people who had been willing to tolerate slavery were no longer willing to. It became clear to many intellectuals that something had to be done.

Lincoln was not entirely a heroic figure. And he never took stands like John Brown. Lincoln was deeply compromised as a lawyer working for the railroads. He was backed by the Vanderbilts, who pushed the Civil War it should not have gone. But Brown’s stand on slavery was an appropriate and brave one, because slavery in the 1850s was extending its tentacles out toward free farmers in the South.

Restrictions on ownership of personal property and on civil liberties were being extended out into ordinary people at that time. Just as the restrictions on prisoners are being extended out today to ordinary citizens. We are crippled by this enormous prison population, let us call them slaves. Having 1.5 million prisoners, the largest prison population in the world, has a baneful influence on our society. Our schools are becoming more like prisons, our workplaces, our local neighborhoods, God forbid, our smart cities, all are looking more and more like prisons.”

Ian Carpenter:

“Yeah, certainly. And just less than 10 minutes away from LiveOne.tv is one of the largest penal colonies in the world, Rikers Island.”

Emanuel Pastreich:

“It is a covert effort to transform the United States under the radar. That transformation was one of the goals of incidents like COVID-19 or 9-11. The goal was to create these distractions and traumas. They were plenty real, real threats, but the trauma kept people from focusing on the critical long-term transformations.

This is the new form of warfare, which Israel is on the cutting edge of, trauma and distraction-based controlled conflict.

Many people assume that in warfare, the faster you move, the better. You are supposed to use over-priced supersonic jets, or missiles, or whatever. But people who actually understand military-intelligence issues know that there’s an opposite strategy, which is to say that the slower you act, the more effective it will be and the less resistance you’ll encounter.

So, we are subject to a punctuated alternation, symphonic alternation between the two states that has been carried out over the last 25 years and rendered America unrecognizable without people even noticing.

In the case of Oklahoma or 9-11 we were subject to traumatic stimulation that is disturbing and shows clearly that something’s wrong. And then, we would go back to this stasis, this boring stasis, that allows for institutional transformations without resistance from the traumatized public.

Then, when they hit the limit of what they can change to create a totalitarian system, then they have to plan another incident to sort of shock people.

That is the nature of war today.

This strategy works because of the structure of the mind, of the brain; there is a subtle relationship between the amygdala, the part of the brain stem that responds to fear, and triggers the “fight or flight” reaction, and the prefrontal cortex, which allows you to gather together diverse information and make rational, logical decisions.

When you are overwhelmed in a frightening 9-11 incident, the amygdala overrides the prefrontal cortex. The fight or flight response kicks in. That allows people to be manipulated emotionally without their being aware that they’re being manipulated.”

Ian Carpenter:

“What you’re talking about, I have heard repeatedly in my conversations for the last 10 years. I’m very interested in everything you’re saying.”

Emanuel Pastreich:

“The point of this campaign is to run as a candidate for president who’s actually talking about what’s going on, as opposed to the limited hangout which is offered to you by the media, by Washington.

I am not discouraged. I think there is great value, to stand up as a candidate alone.

That’s what my talk in New York on May 2, and San Francisco on May 9, is about. I want to say to people that doesn’t matter what happens to me, whether I am elected, or have to leave the country, or whether you find me floating in the East River. That is not important.

What’s important is taking a stand and declaring we need a politics of truth.

Politics is not a bad word in and of itself. It doesn’t have to be negative if politics reflects the actual reality of what’s happening.

The real politics of the United States is a politics in which multinational private equity, investment banks, working together with a small number of extremely rich families, basically from all over the world, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Russian, German, American, etc., are seizing control of our institutions and using those institutions of education, journalism and governance to dumb down the population following a series of supercomputer-guided trajectories.

There are supercomputers running algorithms that confuse the population and create barriers between people. The building up of walls in our society is a good example. Today, on the street by your house, you see a new low barrier by the curb. You do not think much of it. Six months later, it will be taller. A year later it will be concrete and maybe in two years it will be topped with spikes.

This is the classic Israeli approach. In Israel, after six months there will be a booth with one person inside. Then he will have a machine gun a month later. It keeps scaling up.

The whole point of Gaza, what’s been going on there for the last 15 years, is for Israeli companies like BlackCube to develop these technologies for slowly leading people into a trap, dividing them up against each other, and then taking them down.

The process of “prisonification” is mapped out using supercomputers over five, 10, 15 year blocks. Now that is real politics. Politics is not about Trump’s trials or Biden’s stumbles.

I don’t want to say that what Trump and Biden do is irrelevant, but it’s not where the action is. Politics now is about class. It’s about assets and control of assets. It’s about the control of information. But most importantly, politics is about sovereignty, independence and liberty, in the classic American sense.

You need to act for yourself, and to be educated in your family in a way that encourages and supports independent thinking as a citizen.”

Ian Carpenter:

“Bob Dylan said politics is basically just a word for the things that people do. I think that’s very accurate. Ron Paul, he stood in contrast to all these people saying, ‘I’m a businessman. I’m not a politician.’ Dr. Ron Paul used to say, ‘I’m a politician. Look at my record.’ Well, I think that’s what it ought to be.”

Emanuel Pastreich:

“That’s what it ought to be. Barack Obama did not start this mess, but he was the transformative figure. He became a brand like Adidas. And he didn’t make any real decisions. He became president by signing a bunch of classified agreements that he would never prosecute any of these financial giants who made a fortune under the Bush administration. Obama agreed to go forward with this quantitative easing program, essentially to facilitate the takeover of the United States by multinational private equity and investment banks. That was his real job.

The first Black African-American president served to ease that transition to fascism for Americans.

We could feel that we had this progressive, Martin Luther King-type figure in the White House. But it was the complete opposite.”

Ian Carpenter:

“Wow. For the people who are just joining us here right now, we’re talking with presidential candidate Emanuel Pastreich, and he’s running in 2024. Please continue with what you’re telling us.”

Emanuel Pastreich:

“For those who are interested in how I could possibly become president, the answer is pretty clear. Right now, the odds are 50-50.

I’m not going to be able to get on the ballot anywhere because I’m blocked from the start. ‘If you’re not bought and paid for, you ain’t goin’ nowhere.’

The approach is this: to say that we’re going to establish a constitutional democracy, a republic, in the United States. When push comes to shove, we’re going to have the legitimacy that will allow us to put together a real government—as opposed to politicians who are dependent on billionaires and banks.

Now, you may think there are the pie in the sky, crazy ideas of this professor in his little room dreaming up crazy stuff. But we’re on track for an intentional crisis right around the election, intentional in the sense that the investment banks and wealthy individuals see a benefit to be gained from some sort of constitutional crisis in the United States concerning the results of the election.

In such a case, I will be quite competitive, because I’m actually following the Constitution, following the law, and I recognize the United States as a republic. The other candidates are all directly or indirectly supporting state crimes and far from the Constitution in their actions.

One problem in America these days is that people tend to talk about democracy, but they don’t talk about a republic. But a republic is at least as important, or more important, than a democracy because democracy has degenerated to the process of voting for somebody. That process is so easily manipulated and exploited. Whereas having a republic means you have institutions for deliberative planning and the implementation of policy that contain checks and balances. That means you have a functional government. It’s possible to have a democracy in the sense that the masses are satisfied with a bread and circuses agenda, which is a totalitarian system. In fact, I would say that’s where we are now.”

Ian Carpenter:

“Where should we take this conversation? This is the type of conversation I enjoy. But so many of us are the people who smoke cigarettes, buy lottery tickets, and just watch sports all day. How are you going to connect with those voters?”

Emanuel Pastreich:

“This is a difficult task. The first thing we should recognize is that American citizens who are so disengaged from politics, or who are only interested in fashion, or pornography, or online games, or gambling, or the stock market—how much their tiny little investment is going up and down, that these people are victims. They’re victims of an operation to dumb down the population to prepare for totalitarian rule.

We have to get back to ‘the bitter tonic known as truth.’ In other words, the truth is bitter and difficult to swallow but it’s the only medicine that can cure us of this illness. The truth is that this consumption of short-term entertainment, stimulation, sexual excitement drinking and drugs culture was cooked up starting in 1950s for the purpose of social control. It has become more sophisticated in the hands of multinational corporations and banks as a way to undermine citizens, to destroy the democratic process.

If you see advertising on TV for pharmaceuticals, that advertising is not just meant to get you to buy their product. In most cases, it’s not at all about selling you something.

It’s about controlling the content of journalism. That’s why they put those ads up.

They make television series and movies that suggest that we should all live in an upper middle-class environment. If you don’t live that way, then you’re a failure. The movies downgrade moral action of the individual and present superheroes who solve every problem by magic.

The task of being a good father, a good mother, a responsible member of society standing up for important things ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ style, that content has disappeared from the media. And this is not an accident.

It is the same agenda to dumb us down and make us more passive.

The starting point is to recognize that these people caught up in consumption and immediate gratification are victims, and that we can bring them over to our side by having them understand the way in which these interests have compromised us.

We must both be engaged, be understanding. But at the same time, we must take a stand.  

I ran into this problem at the start of COVID-19. It was one of the reasons why I was thrown out of the country in February of 2020 when I started my presidential campaign.

Unlike other candidates, I took an uncompromising position on COVID-19 from the start, in my platform. I publicly demand that not only do all the documents related to the COVID-19 operation have to be declassified, not only do we have to seize the assets of all the multinational investment banks and pharmaceutical companies who were behind this, we have to go after the assets of the billionaire families like the Koch family, or the Walton family, the Gates family, and others for their criminal actions. Only then will COVID-19 be over.

If they say something like ‘you don’t have to get vaccines anymore’ or ‘you don’t have to wear a mask unless we tell you to again,’ that is not the end of COVID-19.

We’re absolutely guaranteed that if we don’t clean house, that they’re going to seize control again some other way. And they’re already doing it.

Right now, the new approach is threatening world war, which is also extremely profitable for some. Although the super-rich don’t necessarily all want war. But getting as close to the edge of war as possible is in their financial and political interests.”

Ian Carpenter:

“Rupert Murdoch’s company News Corp publishes the New York Post. Sometimes there are stories in the Post that are legitimate, even valuable. However, if you look at the day-to-day content, it turns the stomach. At one point they were pushing six to ten stories per issue on the royal family. The content was benign, even banal. Prince Harry thinks that his older brother spends too much time watching TV and he shouldn’t be king, or other ridiculous things. It was not just one or two such articles, but six to ten per issue. And it’s still continuing today.

Edward Snowden made one release in his disclosures in 2013. He took a scraper into the NSA building where he was working in Hawaii. I think that was NSA or it might have been at Booz Allen.

But he took a scraper and he scraped out a bunch of files. One of them included a photograph of the current King Charles sitting inside of GCHQ with Camilla. The King of England was sitting inside the Mass Surveillance Center, GCHQ, which shares its data, according to Snowden, the private records of Americans.

I think the Royal Family or somebody in England is paying for this PR, that is aimed at Americans. This keeps us from having a defiant attitude about a king in our midst who has access to our private records.

But it isn’t only the Royal Family. There are so many articles written to make it seem that they practice critical journalism, but it is just soap opera, a dumbing down. Then they push their hardcore issues like why we’ve got to get more money into the Ukraine.

Then Piers Morgan will write a story saying, ‘Come on, get a stiff upper grip Americans and get more funding.’

It’s not only the New York Post; it’s pretty much all of the mainstream. I take a look at it from time to time. It’s torture to read it. I just wish more people could be liberated from the crap. It’s an unhealthy, toxic experience. People want to know what’s going on around the world. News can be educational. It’s so sad when it gets so distorted.”

Emanuel Pastreich:

“That is 100 percent accurate. There are different markets, but the bottom line is not that different for The New York Times. The New York Times throws in some hard vocabulary to make sure you went to college, it features pictures of upper middle-class people at the art shows and in their Upper West Side apartments, their studio lofts. The basic line is similar. We see an alternation between the banal and the stimulating, the shocking carnival style of horror movies.

And this approach is intentional. We need to look at the iron triangle which is between Washington, D.C., to some degree New York, London, and Tel Aviv, and now Jerusalem.

These three sides linked together are the cancerous remnants of the British Empire. They have taken on a new form, and now are invigorated. And that’s why we Americans coming back to the Declaration of Independence is so unpopular for the elites. That text was drafted with the assumption that the United States would be independent from the British Empire.

That is the bottom line for the elites pushing royalty in the New York Post. They want us to forget the independence of the United States.

It is equally pernicious that only people who are branded as conservatives can talk about the Constitution in the media, about the governance, the republic. So many progressives are lost in identity politics, or gender politics, or other distractions, and not focused on how government is actually run. Some say that because the men who signed the Constitution owned slaves, or were misogynist, therefore the Constitution has no value. That is a big mistake.”

Ian Carpenter: Can you say more about your academic career?

Emanuel Pastreich: I started my career as a professor of Asian studies. Soon I discovered that there was no money for Asian studies at the University of Illinois—where I taught after obtaining a Ph.D. from Harvard—even though Asia was emerging as the most important part of the world economy. So I started asking some stupid questions like, ‘Hey, why don’t we have more funding for Asian studies?’

That is when I discovered that there were some hidden hands behind the budget decisions at the University of Illinois who were not interested in our student’s futures. I watched, as a professor, how universities were transformed into hostile entities that were no longer about educating, but about dumbing down people, about inculcating wrong values and wrong understandings. That was especially true in the field of economics where our students were fed fairy tales about growth, the importance of consumption, or the stock market. These are things that have zero scientific basis but universities are free to force-feed to students. That awareness of what was so wrong in education drove me into the political realm. I didn’t want to be a politician. I still don’t want to be a politician. If someone else will play this role, I welcome him or her and support him or her.

But true politics is stressful and dangerous. Many want to reform politics, but not many people are willing to take that level of risk.”

Ian Carpenter:

“And it’s not financially beneficial. The people that I talk to are going to be fascinated to hear this conversation.”

Emanuel Pastreich:

“The central issue in American politics, the number one issue, is secret governance. You can watch the political show on TV, but you will never understand the three means by which decisions are being made in government.

The first means is classified directives, an approach to government that originated in the intelligence community and the Department of Defense, but now has spread to every part of the federal government, including agriculture. Government is run by classified directives which cannot be disclosed to the public. This includes national security letters that you can be served with and will shut you up. The new FISA renewal law says that you cannot even consult a lawyer about national security letters.

The second is secret law which is passed by Congress. Secret law has the same effect as federal law, but it’s illegal to disclose it. The existence of secret law is not a secret. You can find documentation on it, but no one’s going to talk to you about what the content of secret laws is.

The third, and most common, means is nondisclosure agreements. If you do basically any work involving government, you’re forced to sign nondisclosure agreements, contracts which say that, if the government, or your employer to whom government functions are outsourced, is engaged in any illegal activities, no matter how illegal or how unconstitutional they may be, that you will go to jail and/or pay enormous fines if you tell anybody.

The bottom line in American politics is that it’s impossible to do anything. The system is all fixed by this secret governance system. That is the legacy of the British Empire which reabsorbed the United States from the First World War on.

We want to take on state crimes and to expose how they use a progressive, inclusive language as a way to put a velvet glove on a steel fist. For us at Green Liberty, those politics were unacceptable. We feel that if we don’t take on state crimes, none of this identity politics is going to mean much.”

Ian Carpenter:

“Your discussion of state crimes is where we want to zero in.”

Emanuel Pastreich:

“I appreciate it that you had me on your show. It’s important for the people to know that the problem is not that there are no candidates out there. Rather, anyone who’s capable of doing a serious job is considered a threat. The whole system is rigged that it’s impossible for real candidates to get through the meat grinder.  

There are two tiers to it. One is what happens if you’re saying something that the powers that be don’t want to be have heard. In my case that is my stress on the three truths: 9-11 truth, COVID-19 truth, and Federal Reserve truth. Federal Reserve truth refers to how we counterfeit trillions of dollars and then launder the money through the Pentagon or other sources that have expanded to include all parts of the federal government for the private banks.

If you address any of these three truths, even indirectly, then you’re not going to be able to raise any money. That means you can’t play the game. You can’t get on TV. You will not be invited to events, and even the so-called ‘truth tellers’—who for the most part are limited hangout guys—are not going to engage you.

There is another level to it. There are specific programs, primarily under Homeland Security, with anti-disinformation budgets that are given out to private contractors. People say it is government doing these things but it is contractors like Booz Allen, Hamilton or CASI.  

There’s now a whole range of these firms, including many Israeli firms, and they get DHS budgets worth billions.

Those programs are not necessarily intending to kill you, or to threaten you, but just to make sure that you’re not going to get anywhere in your movement, your campaign.

They’ll throw people at you to be your supporters who’ll then stab you in the back, or they’ll block you out of social media in subtle ways, or other things. 10,000 people may see you on YouTube, but YouTube will just indicate three viewers.

They will use low-level, low-intensity, interference and lawfare to keep you pinned down. This is the field, by the way, where Israel is the king of the hill. Israel has developed extremely sophisticated forms of interference in Gaza.

This is one of the things that disappointed me about Cornel West, and others, who are saying that Gaza is about how mean Israelis are to Palestinians. That is the truth; I

don’t deny that. But Gaza is ultimately an experiment. It’s a test bed for using various forms of surveillance, tracking, and intelligence convergence, for employing drones, robots, and a variety of other technologies that haven’t been disclosed to the public so as to systematically destroy a population.

At the beginning of the Gaza operation, they selected around 20,000 people who they were going to kill and they entered all the information about these people in supercomputers which they used to kill them all over a period of three months. The point is that what is being done in Gaza could be done in your neighborhood in a couple years, once they perfect the technology.

When I say ‘they’ I’m not just talking about Israelis, I’m talking about anybody who would be interested in purchasing such technology from BlackCube, for example, one of the big vendors in Israel. They can put that technology to work in your neighborhood. It could be in Arkansas or in Texas: your neighborhood. This is increasingly true in the United States where we witness the unfortunate blending together of privatized security systems of the United States, Israel, and to some degree the UK. That is the core of the global information-military-industrial-financial blob.”

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1. Nate Cohn, “Just What Kind of a Third-Party Candidate Is R.F.K. Jr.?” The New York Times, May 4, 2024, A14. ↑

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