Emanuel on the Presidential Campaign on "What's Left"

What’s Left

Setting the Record Straight on Presidential Campaign

Andrew Libson interviewed independent candidate for president Emanuel Pastreich just weeks before the most consequential election in American history for the leading progressive podcast in the United States “What’s Left.”

Emanuel Pastreich

Independent Candidate for President

October 12, 2024

What’s Left

“Setting the Record Straight on Presidential Campaign”

With Independent Candidate Emanuel Pastreich

Link to original interview:

October 12, 2024

Andrew Libson

Welcome to What's Left, A weekly political discussion that challenges the mainstream left. My name is Andy Lipson and today we're joined by Gema Alberto-Sotomayor.

But if you look closely, you will see there's a third person here. The person is Emanuel Pastreich. He was a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and was also a candidate as president for the Green Party last year.

Emanuel Pastreich

Thank you for having me, Andy. I appreciate it.  

Andrew Libson

Listeners may recognize your name because three weeks ago we had an episode in which we talked about Emanuel and the US elections with Kate Frye of the Workers League. We were approached by Workers League who support Emanuel’s candidacy. We talked about socialism, elections, and other things, including, obviously, his candidacy.

You listened to that episode and you told us, “Well, it was a good episode, but there were a few things that were not quite right. Hey, could I come on and talk more about my candidacy?” 

We're going to try to set the record straight here, speaking with the actual man himself.

I wasn't sure, is he running for president? Is he not running for president? Now you're going to clarify that point for us and then we'll take it from there.

Emanuel Pastreich

I appreciate your consideration and thank you for the opportunity.

Andrew Libson

Yeah, so go ahead and talk about anything else from that episode that you want to clear up. Let us start out by asking, Is Emanuel Pastreich running for president?

Emanuel Pastreich

That is an excellent question and I think we must go back to the basics. Running for president of the United States today is not defined by the Constitution and it is not defined by law. It's basically a system in which billionaires and multinational corporations give large amounts of money to particular candidates and promote them in the media so that they appear to be legitimate. And then they're put through these organizations, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and also the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, which are, as I discovered, not that different from each other in terms of their structure and their function. Those “parties” give candidates a stamp of legitimacy and then they're forced fed to the American people. It doesn't seem very democratic and it doesn't seem like an election. It's more a ritual of legitimization by corrupt systems.

The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are essentially criminal syndicates. They launder money for private equity, increasingly through Israeli operatives, and front for global billionaires via their strategic teams. Now there is a difference between the two big parties. There's a chocolate flavored totalitarianism and a strawberry flavored totalitarianism. The Democratic Party tends represent global finance, a little bit more the entertainment and media IT companies, although there's some overlap now. The Republican party has more backing from cowboy hedge fund traders, from real estate developers, from military contractors, and from coal, gas, and oil interests like the Koch family.

My position is that I'm still running for president in accord with the Constitution and I will not recognize this election as legitimate. I think we should have a new legitimate election in the manner that other countries have done and I will run in that election.

It's only the United States, which is so proud, wherein not a single public intellectual is demanding that we hold an internationally supervised election. I called for an internationally supervised transparent election publicly. To be honest, I was a little disappointed that my fellow intellectuals, if I can be presumptuous, have not taken the same stand. None of them come out and say this election is unacceptable.

We must have an internationally-supervised transparent election using paper ballots in which citizens are provided with accurate information about the candidates and the issues in a transparent manner. So that is my position. I am a candidate and I will run and I will win when we hold a legitimate election.

So, what's going to happen on November 5th? Well, I'm not a fortune teller or prophet so I don't know. But I think that it will be a profound institutional crisis.

For me, the real campaign, the movement to establish again a constitutional, accountable, rule-of-law republic starts on November 5th.

I am a candidate for president in the moral, constitutional, legal sense, but I'm not registered with the Federal Election Commission. I'm not on the ballot in any state, and I take pride in this fact. I didn't take a penny from any billionaires or corporations. All the money we got through Green Liberty PAC was small donations from individual activists.

Gema Sotomayor

You're not on any official ballot, right? You're not registered. You know what the end game is, then. You are not going to win. You're not going to get the votes needed to win.

Then my question would be, besides bringing light to the fact that the election is rigged, that it's not a clean system--and it’s not a clean election--what are you trying to do?

We don't believe in voting. We take that position for the reasons you mentioned, plus some.

Emanuel Pastreich

Understood.

Gema Sotomayor

Is the goal just to highlight this situation: your way of standing your ground and saying, “this is a joke.”  I want a little bit more information. There is a reason why you did it, right? You're putting energy and time into this campaign. So, there must be more. What's the end game?

Emanuel Pastreich

In my mind I can imagine a scenario in which I win. So, it's not entirely a symbolic effort as is the case for some other candidates. What would be a scenario in which I win? We can define what “win” means, but I mean a scenario in which my campaign accomplishes its goal.

The first scenario is one in which you have an election wherein the Democrats and Republicans, each representing different corporate interests, private equity, and billionaire families, don't recognize the results. The Democrats don't recognize Trump as president and the Republicans doesn't recognize Harris as president. The result is an institutional, political, and ideological split. 

In that case, they will need some third party to step in who has legitimacy, both ethical and institutional. They will have to say, “Hey, let's forget about this election. Neither of these guys have any legitimacy. Let's go back and try to build a nation that's by the people, that represents the interests of the people, and is not ruled by this techno- totalitarian system.”

In such a scenario--which at this point is looking like 60 to 70 percent probability--it will not be important how many votes I got. What will determine the course of history is that I'm willing to take a stand and to ask, what is the United States? What is our country and who does it belong to? Same question globally: Who controls the earth and its inhabitants?

At that point, I can make a powerful argument for what needs to be done, an argument that none of the people who appear on TV can. In fact, I have been making sophisticated arguments for how to restore the nation for the last four years in my speeches.

We need to set the foundations for a legitimate government, to claim the power of the people to create institutions, not just to vote for cardboard messiahs, and that claim has precedent in the Declaration of Independence which is the foundational text that established the United States, that gives our government legitimacy.

That foundational document has a passage which says,

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations evinces a design to reduce the people under absolute despotism, it is the people’s right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

That is to say that revolutionary change, as opposed to progressive change, is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence—at the heart of our own political tradition.

The current situation meets the qualifications for revolutionary change according to the law as set forth in the Declaration of Independence. It's certainly my intention to contest the election, but in a far more aggressive manner than Donald Trump who is essentially playing to his own audience: people like Elon Musk.

For Trump and Musk, the idea of revolution, or transformation, is reduced to a tool for social control.

I don't know what's going to happen. I will be in the United States. I'm in Tokyo now but I'll go back to Boston next week. I'll be there for the election, and, at the minimum, myself and a small group of my supporters will contest the election and because we are not part of the sick monster, what we say it the weeks ahead will resonate with many.

Unlike Donald Trump, I'm not going to say this election was stolen from me, not because that’s not true, but rather because the election doesn't belong to me and it doesn't belong to Donald Trump either. This is not pro wrestling. The election belongs to the citizens.

I'm not important. If they lock me up as soon as I get off the plane, or after the election, that's fine. I accept that. But I hope we can get the ball rolling, to declare that citizens can empower themselves. It is the classic “speech act” as we say in the literary theory. The minister at a wedding, says, “I pronounce you husband and wife.” It's just words. But those words can be transformative, with impact for a lifetime.

It is the same if I go forward on election day and declare that “We are a government of the people, by the people, and for the people and therefore the citizens are empowered to overthrow a tyranny.”

These are just words, but if those words are effectively highlighted, if they are properly positioned, properly supported with precedents from the march of history, then even a vanguard of say three of us, a small group, is enough to transform the politics of the United States.

Andrew Libson

Well, the part that I understand, or at least I can grasp, is the notion that we can bring about a transformation of the electoral system, of our political system and that such a transformation would require revolution.

Absolutely. And you didn't cite the Constitution, you cited the Declaration of Independence. That document was the pre-statement, what came prior to removing a tyranny and establishing a new order-- regardless of how much change actually happened. It was a document saying that we need to have revolutionary change.

I agree with that.

I have some questions about the way you put it because it sounds like you are saying that if Democrats wouldn't accept Trump and the Republicans wouldn't accept Harris then the revolution will come as a result of ruling class squabble.

First off, I don't even see even the differences between Harris and Trump you suggested. And that's not a political stance, I am just saying that either will provide a vessel for the ruling class to work; they will put their hand inside the puppet and use it in the way that they want.

One could say that with Trump you get a spicier puppet but it's still a puppet. This takes us back to Gema's question.

If we're talking about a revolution, then the thing you are attempting to stir up through your candidacy is something that comes from below.

So, the question is what's will be the connection between what you're doing now and the possibility of stirring something from below?

To affect that kind of revolution will definitely take more than the three of us, or 300 of us, or even 300,000 of us. We're talking about mobilizing a hundred million to 150 million people with an aim towards transforming our society. If we're talking about the actual transformation of institutions, creating something that is completely different, but we see that out of a population of 300 million, half of it, does not show up at the polls.

They might show up to the polls to elect you, but that is just a precondition for them taking their own actions in their own communities to completely transform the society that they live in.

Emanuel Pastreich

I agree that a small group cannot achieve such a revolution, or transformation.  The current strikes at Boeing and the International Longshoreman Association strikes--even though the longshoreman strike was brutally repressed using death threats against the leadership of the union--offer us real hope. The strike by Boeing workers and the longshoremen’s strike, both strikes strike at the heart of the beast: the military industrial complex and the “free trade” shipping, logistics, distribution, and retail sales complex. These two evil twins rule the United States. Those strikes could include a hundred thousand people, or more with sympathy strikes.

I feel that working with, supporting, those strikes would be more meaningful than working with the Green Party or the Libertarian Party—both of which are deeply corrupt, and more valuable than trying to get on the ballot through these horrific rituals that have been established, which are undemocratic, unconstitutional, and immoral.

I'm not saying I made enormous progress in reaching the strikers, but if we could reach out to these striking workers then we could be up to a hundred thousand and we're taking on the beast, grabbing it by the horns. I was impressed that workers were willing to do that. It doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with everything that they're demanding. It doesn't mean that they're all working class. Nevertheless, the position of confronting the beast directly taken by the strikers is more promising than the election itself.

Gema Sotomayor

I want to acknowledge that you're doing something. The things we have discussed are what we know needs to change.

I don't vote and I want to explain why I don't vote.

Rather than give a counter argument, I would rather to ask what is the path to that revolution? How do you see it happening? How do we get there? How do we make it happen?

While the steps that you're taking may not be the revolution, you're doing something more than a lot of us. We just talk about it. You're putting yourself out there; you have an idea and you're rolling with it.

I do want to commend that. But then my question then is, if this happens, if we make the connections with labor, with the unions on strike, and then we start to mobilize. And I could see this happening if the chips all land in the right place, then how do you envision the electoral system working?

Gema Sotomayor:

The United States is a big country, so it's difficult to gather together as a group. I'm part of an organization of seven and it's difficult for us to agree on something. You mentioned the election being overseen by an international committee, which is something I'm opposed to.

I think that if we did that we would just be wading back into the same global network—that is the way that it works. The global system is just the larger part of what we call the United States.

Emanuel Pastreich

I believe that the election is but one part of the puzzle, and it is not even the primary one. But taking on the election can be a catalyst for launching the revolution.

Having international oversight does not necessarily mean working with the United Nations or other compromised global organization. I'm an internationalist, not a globalist. I do believe that international cooperation is helpful, and I think that we can discuss how that supervision would work at a later date.

Let us be specific: I was discussing with my good friend Morrigan Johnson recently the value offered by the precedent of the German Revolution of 1918. That revolution was ultimately unsuccessful, but it was almost successful and might be the closest model for what we need to do.

Germany was run in 1918 by a similar military industrial complex to ours which reduced Germany to a society dominated by finance and the military, one that became more oppressive, not less oppressive, as First World War took a turn for the worse. Eventually it got to the point that the workers and the soldiers started to form groups to oppose this criminality, and they were eventually able to overthrow that monster from within, a monster that had been created by the Warburgs, the Goulds, and the Rothchilds.

I want to be practical, to talk about what's going to happen in the United States, not dream about what we want to happen. It's going to be ugly, and it’s going to get worse. It's going to require us to be strong, to be able to look at things we don’t want to see like people suffering and being killed; also we will have to look at human nature in its ugliest form—and at the same time not lose hope for the potential for positive change.

I refer to the German Revolution in recent discussions, not because it was successful, or even that I fully agree with the strategies employed by thinkers like Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, but because I think the German Revolution is a good example of what might actually happen in the United States, as opposed to a Bernie Sanders fantasy world.

We need to be clear-headed about what we are going to do. We have an economy that is dominated by the military—how concretely are we going to transform that economy? I find it offensive that the progressive politicians wave away this reality and just propose some positive thinking and donations to the Green Party.

When people tell me that we had better vote for Harris or we're going to lose our democracy, I want to laugh. We lost our democracy 30 years ago, if not earlier. It's a delusional and counterproductive to claim we are protecting our democracy.

It's much better to strip it all down and say, “this is what we're facing. This is our reality.”

We have to look at the reality we face. There are two parts.

On the one hand, we have been force fed in a very sophisticated way, by multinational corporations and the privileged, a consumption-based narcissistic culture that is dominated by the cult of the self and that discourages working together and glorifies the rich.

If you watch “All in the Family” or other 1970s TV dramas, people lived in middle class, or even lower middle class, environments.

Not anymore. Now everybody on TV is living like they're making $200,000 a year. That bankrupt consumer culture and worship of the rich is what ordinary citizens are subjected to on TV, in advertisements, posters, and social media.

One part of the problem is this corrupt culture that is being generated by the rich. We can fight back by creating our own culture. That's the most important step.

The other half of the problem the emergence of a techno-totalitarian surveillance and manipulation system, one holding up the flag of “Department of Homeland Security” which works with private industry, private intelligence firms like Booz Allen Hamilton, CASI, and others. Those companies get classified homeland security “anti-disinformation” budgets, and they use them to infiltrate your group, to throw at you some crazy person who will eat up your time with stupid questions to distract you. There is a manual that was declassified in 1970s that explains how to do it. You send in these loony people to make up problems out of nothing. The agent creates a controversy, then demands to form a committee, then spends hours with lots of people all around talking about irrelevant things and stirring up unnecessary fights between people. This is real politics in America today—and I have seen such agents at work. But not even the conspiracy websites will talk about how this part of politics really works.

We're fighting on both sides: against a false common sense that was created by the powerful on the one side and against actual infiltration and manipulation on the other side.

I experienced this in my one-month running in the Green Party. Cornel West and I were the only candidates in the Green Party who were registered, had websites, and who were broadly supported as candidates.

But I didn't exist in the Green Party, not a single website in the United States, not even alternative conspiracy theory website, mentioned that I was a candidate. And the articles describing my run in the Green Party were published outside of the United States.

So how did they control the Green Party? I think the only way was by using the three tools of Homeland Security: classified directives and national security letters served to members of the Green Party, the invocation of secret law (law passed by Congress that cannot be disclosed), and the enforcement of non-disclosure agreements.

Congress can pass a secret law (which is going on right now) that says What's Left cannot be broadcast to more than 5,000 people. Such a law, which Homeland Security must follow, has the binding authority of federal law, but you cannot talk about its existence or you will be fined or put in jail for disclosing it. Recently, the Congress approved national security letters which, if you are served with, you are not permitted to event consult with a lawyer about.

The most common way to stop political activity is the demand for the signing of non-disclosure agreements. The United States government signs contracts with private contractors, or with Israeli security firms, for example, according to which whatever actions are taken, even if illegal and immoral, can never be disclosed without grave consequences.

A typical contract with Homeland Security, or DoD, consists of a bland memorandum of understanding that says we're going to cooperate. But then there is a secret addendum, often classified, that spells out how things actually work. IE, once you sign this contract, you have to advocate for vaccines, or you can never talk about what Israel is really doing.

These secret agreements created the enormous crisis we face in Palestine. For example, the Green Party candidate Jill Stein can oppose the Gaza Genocide in principle, and can mention how IDF is cruel to Palestinians. That is true, and it is great she says it.

But Stein is not allowed to say that the same military contractors who are perfecting their technologies for social control in Gaza are bidding for, and getting, contracts for security on the Mexican American border, are getting contracts for security at your shopping center, with your local police department. Those secret agreements black out much of what is really happening in America and how what's happening in Gaza and Lebanon today is what will happen in America tomorrow. 

Unfortunately, the left in the United States has not been able, with some rare exceptions, to speak the truth because they are under orders not to speak the truth.

Andrew Libson

If I could wave a magic wand and make Emanuel Pastreich president, through whatever method…

Emanuel Pastreich 

To be a magician.

Andrew Libson

That somehow using the tools and levers to be found in the halls of existing power you could actually help to make revolutionary transformation of society a possibility working from that position. Am I mishearing that? I don't think that's true.

Emanuel Pastreich

So, the honest answer to that question is that if I were elected president, or became president somehow, then entering the White House would be the same as entering a maximum-security prison.

At this point, the odds of my becoming president, unlike Jill Stein of the Green Party, or Cornel West the independent, is not zero. I am going to contest the election itself. That means there will be a possible scenario in which when the Republicans and Democrats start to war with each other and then, in the resulting chaos, people will look around for someone who is neither a Democrat nor a Republican and who has qualifications and some legitimacy. That could make me a real candidate.

But I do not think even that scenario would offer us a route to real change.

When Donald Trump entered the White House, he was told, in no uncertain terms, that his life was at stake. The same was true in the “attempted assassination.” Donald Trump was not subject to real assassination attempt. Nevertheless, the message was clear: if you do not do what we say, this is what will happen.

There are three models for political action that suggest what we need to do in the days ahead, if we grasp where we stand in the flow of history.

The first is the actions of John Brown and his followers in 1859. On October 16, 1859 (my birthday) John Brown and his followers raided the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia and declared a provisional government for a nation free of slavery.

They declared, in the face of convention and practice, that slavery is not a peculiar institution, but rather an active war against the citizens of the United States. John Brown said that they followed the Constitution and Declaration of Independence (he wrote a “Declaration of Liberty” as well) but they did not recognize the current federal government with its commitment to chattel slavery.

John Brown and his small group were arrested quickly. There were a series of trials and John Brown and others were hanged. The uprising was militarily unsuccessful, but ideologically was a success. The discourse on slavery in America was permanently transformed. Those who had bought into a progressive idea of slowly eliminating slavery, or tolerating a different slave culture out of respect for tradition, previously no longer could tolerate such acts of barbarism.

The second example was the effort of Jean Jaurès, head of the Socialist Party of France, and Hugo Haase, the head of the German Socialist Party, to launch a general strike in France and Germany in 1914 to mobilize workers against the drive for war.

Jaurès was assassinated immediately and Haase was assassinated in 1919. The general strike was a failure, but many people were inspired to carry on the fight for peace during the war, and after the war, by their heroic, almost superhuman efforts.

The third example is the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943. At the time in most of Europe fascistic governance was accepted as the norm. In Hungary, Poland and other countries the political struggle was over.

But this small group of people facing extermination in the Warsaw Ghetto organized themselves, came up with a plan, and risked everything to completely reject the entire fascist system.

The uprising was unsuccessful and few survived. However, many historians assert that after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising you start to get organized resistance again in Hungary, in Poland, and even in Germany. That is to say the manner in which the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising claimed intellectual and political autonomy for themselves transformed political awareness throughout Europe.

I'm not asking to be sacrificed; I am not sure I could undertake that sort of operation—although I accept whatever my fate may be. Nevertheless, to take a stand and articulate a position can have concrete historical, moral, and institutional significance,

Andrew Libson

I appreciate you saying that. It's easy to make light of the risks, to lighten the mood to say, I guess you might hope that when you arrive in Washington, they will have the noose waiting for you so that we can get this thing going.

I think you said something important about the possibility of revolutionary change that is not limited to people like yourself who are presenting themselves as potential candidates for an election, or leaders in a revolution. 

People have to understand that we are signing up for something serious, something in which your life could be at stake. Gema knows that from her experience in Nicaragua. Anybody who knows the revolutionary tradition knows that those are the stakes.

That’s not to say that “You got to be willing to die.”

People take these actions because they want to have something to live for.

Unfortunately, the people who want to keep society unchanged are willing to kill you if you propose an alternative.

I think all of us need to make that kind of commitment. It is not so much a commitment to change as to doing what you believe in.

In the current election system, however, it is somebody else telling you what to believe in. It's an invitation to drift away from your own beliefs and to consume their ideas. There's nothing worth dying for in that.

It is worth someone dying for his or her own beliefs, and I see that value even if I do not share the beliefs.  It’s more about people fighting for what they believe in.

One could say your life's not worth living unless you're willing to do that. It's like living on standing up instead of on your knees.

It is not a small thing you're pointing out, that people must put their life on the line to make a change. At the same time, other people have done that, and it didn't turn out as well, did not make the difference they hoped for.

Emanuel Pastreich

That's correct.  

Andrew Libson

But I think they lived.

Emanuel Pastreich

Their ideas may work out in the long term. We may not get a clear answer in our lifetimes. 

Andrew Libson 

Such people lived a life worth living.

I want to return to the point that Gema also made. So let us say that in 2024, you do not become president, you do get the change you want.

What sort of transformation from below do you hope to produce as a result of your campaign? Do you have any specific aspirations or hopes?

Emanuel Pastreich

We already have a growing team. We have Workers League, Green Liberty, which was a caucus in Green Party that has broken off and formed a PAC, in part because many of its members were thrown out of the Green Party for their activism.

We're growing and now we work with you. There is a constituency out there and it is growing. I think the silent majority who understand what we say but are afraid to act is also growing rapidly.

People are confused and they do not want to commit to anything. They know there's something deeply fraudulent in politics, but they are either discouraged because everything they observe is so negative or they sense the overwhelming strength of the corporate state.

We need to reach out to people outside of our circles.

The strategy of the rich is to use supercomputers to track us, to calculate and anticipate our actions, and to preempt our activities. One of the strategies used by Amazon, Google, and Facebook is to corral all these revolutionaries into closed groups, just have them talking to each other, not to working people. Then they throw in some provocateur who will waste their time stupid arguments about ideology.

I have a book called “How to Take Down the Billionaires: A Manual in Eleven chapters” which you can download from my website. In it I present some of basics of how we can take control.

I think that establishing a common community is the most effective tool long term. Let us say that Gema, Andy, and Emanuel promise that we will do everything we can, including financially, to help each other, that we agree that whatever troubles you have I will do my best to help, and I you'll promise to do the same for me.

We will form a real community, in every sense of the word, a “band of brothers” to quote the Henry V. Then we can extend that group. If we have a band of brothers, people who are committed to creating a better country, a better world, by adhering both to basic ethical principles and the rule of law, to carrying out transparent and participatory governance, that can be extended to form a movement from the bottom up.

I'm not a fan of the federal government, but I cite the Constitution in my speeches because it's common knowledge and it helps people from different backgrounds to talk to each other. The Constitution means the rule of law for me which is the starting point for finding commonalities.

If we can form that sort of a community that will serve as the foundation for everything that follows. We would be better off with a group ten committed ethical people who are marching forward bravely than having a Republican or Democratic national convention where billionaires play footie with each other and put on a narcissistic consumption orgy to delude the people.

Historically, I can cite many examples in which small committed groups end up triumphing over well-funded all-powerful groups.  

Gema Sotomayor 

It does take that kind outreach and I thank you for coming on our show. Our viewership is small, and many folks listen rather than watch our YouTube page. But that's what it is.

We started with just a couple of people who feel very strongly that something is wrong, and they want to talk about it.

Politics is about getting the ball rolling.

And in that sense, you have a vision for what might get that ball rolling. Now, do your actions actually get the ball rolling? We don't know. Yet it's something you have to do. That's the only way you're going to know if the ball is going to roll or not.

Once the ball is rolling, we need to think about how do we guide that ball? Where do we want it to go? And that's where we need to build these networks.

That is why I am a big supporter of channels like “What's Left.” We need to start in our own community to find common ground, to realize there's something wrong, and to build that network so that when something does happen, it will be easier to mobilize.

You have something there. It is hard for me to envision how it would work in the United States, a huge country. In Nicaragua it was easier for me to imagine what we would do because it has a small population.

And it's not just the amount of people in America, there are cultural barriers because it is such a melting pot. There are so many different people from different parts of the world and they think differently, see things differently. You need to have very solid ground to move forward.

We are not going to agree on everything, but we need to have a solid understanding on the basics. It starts with simple recognition that the system is corrupt. The electoral system is corrupt. If you're participating in it, you're contributing to it. So, we agree here. there. You've given me some fruit for thought. 

Andrew Libson

I've been thinking about how to form networks for political action. At the end of the day these online networks are not going to be successful because we're operating in their terrain.

They are going to cut us off because our communications go through their networks.

When things went down in North Carolina around Hurricane Helena, I reached out to J and JD who are right there in Asheville, North Carolina.

They have a home school, a “freedom school,” they run. They're closer to the mountains where I hope they are safe. This show is one of the ways I learn about what is really going on from people in different areas. You're not going to get the truth from the mainstream media and you are not necessarily going to get the truth from the independent media. We swim in a sea of lies.

We need to find out what people at the location are saying, even if they're seeing only part of the picture. For example, I reached out to Max Wilbert about the lithium mining. I asked him about the relationship between lithium mining in North Carolina and the hurricane. He was skeptical of those theories. Before, I did not have that sort of network of people to talk to.

Emanuel Pastreich

I was going to make a statement about the Hurricane Helena, but the information was so contradictory that I hesitated. From my readings, I could see how both sides were spinning the story for their own purposes.

I think we have to embrace the fact that we don't fully understand this conflict between various political players, but also recognize that it's plenty real and they are mean. The whole issue of weather modification has been used to divide us very effectively. The media and alternative media treat the issue like climate change and weather modification are mutually exclusive. Either you believe there is climate change, or you think it is all human weather manipulation.

But the scientific truth is that you can have long-term climate change due to human activity and weather modification. The whole debate is set up to have the two sides fight each other, to create fights between interpretive communities, and as a result nowhere is there room for discussion about we the people versus the super-rich.

Andrew Libson 

I take seriously the argument that resonances from the ground created weather modifications, controlled the hurricanes. But I do not know for sure. I think it is entirely possible. I know that Max thinks that's crazy; but it is important for me to stay in touch with Max and be capable of saying, “I kind of lean in that direction.”  But Max, who is somebody I respect, doesn't think that's true.

The issue for me is staying in touch with the people I've met along the way, identifying where we agree or disagree, might align or not align, and just staying in harmony with each other regardless.

I don't know the truth because there's so many lies. I'm still waking up from the lies I was told five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago.

I don't want to split from anyone on the basis of a disagreement over interpretation.

I maintain those relations because I don’t know absolutely what's true and also because I believe the only thing that will allow us to organize and resist is our connections with each other.  

Emanuel Pastreich 

I totally agree with your statement about the state we find ourselves in. I would add that there has been a profound, strategic effort to promote anti-intellectualism in the United States, to dumb us down and to attack objective inquiry.

I witnessed this as professor at University of Illinois for eight years. I watched the policies that stressed that management, administration, business, law, and engineering as being important while philosophy, literature, history, art were marginal, unimportant.

Such policies gutted our civilization. Now we have extremely well-educated people who are sleepwalkers. I mean “sleepwalker” in the political sense used as in Hermann Broch’s novel “The Sleepwalkers” (Die Schlafwandler) from 1930.

The novel “The Sleepwalkers” describes the years leading up to the First World War, an age which was much like the current moment.  Broch suggested that the politicians, the intellectuals, were sleepwalkers in the sense that just like a sleepwalker can open the refrigerator, or set the table, or even drive a car while being deep asleep, so also the intellectuals of that period could present complex cases in court, write scientific articles, play complex musical pieces, and engage in sophisticated discourse on policy, but when it came to the spread of a military economy and the endless drive for war all around them, they were completely asleep; they had no clue as to the cliff that they were approaching.

We find ourselves in that position. It is not a matter of some bad apple like Trump or Harris. The ultimate cause is the systematic destruction of the intellectual capacity of citizens, from working people all the way up to professors, to engage in an objective analysis and assessment of the world around them, to understand the strands of culture and philosophy, to grasp the metaphysical and epistemological foundations behind what we see, and to understand how our actions are related to long historical processes.

I'm not a magician. I'm not saying that if you vote for me on November fifth, we're going to transform the United States by magic. But that is what Trump, Harris, Stein, and Kennedy are saying.   

I'm suggesting that we can make that date a historical moment, an inflection point that transforms the awareness of citizens. Allowing people to recognize for the first time, “This is who I am, and what am not. This is the true state of the society that I live in. I've been bombarded with these papier mâché prophets and cardboard messiahs and the puppet masters behind them. Now I will seek the truth.”

“The truth will set you free.” Knowing will be liberating and then we can start to move forward.

I cite the Constitution to justify my campaign, but the Constitution is just a starting point.  Ultimately, we need to honestly debate how we will be governed. I would even suggest we move towards a constitutional convention once we have guards in place to keep it from being hijacked.

We need to update governance to address new issues like technology and how it's affected us, and globalization, but we can also correct the flaws in the current constitution, specifically the excessive centralization of power.

That constitutional convention would include a reevaluation of the roots of America, including the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, but also the Iroquois Nation’s “Great Law,” and other native traditions of governance, all of which are more participatory, more long-term, and more sustainable.

Gema Sotomayor

Critical thinking is what has been eliminated. It's critical thinking that the Constitution takes into account, providing correctional power, a balance of powers between the legislative, the executive, and the judicial.

But it seems that these powers are the reason we do not have critical thinking. That they do not balance each other out at all, but they work together against us.

Andrew Libson

Right, there is a balance of power in their control over us. That's basically what it boils down to.

Gema Sotomayor 

I agree that critical thinking has declined. I went to college, but I dropped out. While I loved some aspects of college education, I discovered that the critical thinking portion was all but gone. They just train you to be repetitive monkeys. 

Emanuel Pastreich 

My son also dropped out of college. I think it was because it wasn't really college anymore. And I saw that change as a professor. I watched the decay of the angel, the process by which education became a combination of propaganda and behavioral modification.

Gema Sotomayor

That all goes to say that everything needs to start from scratch, not just our government, but also our education system. We need to go back to the stone age and to start all over everything we’ve messed up. 

Andrew Libson

During the Covid time, I discovered that a lot of my comrades, almost all my comrades, whom I assumed would line up to fight big pharma, fight genetic modification, fight all these evils, they suddenly opposed me completely, and went against their own belief systems—in my opinion.

But then I found weird people, maybe anarchists this, or right wing that, or yoga this. And they would come out against Covid even though the rest of their comrades, their yoga comrades, or GMO fighting comrades, all went along with the program.

But for some reason these oddballs would not go with the program. I would ask them, “Why didn't you go with the program?”

At the beginning, before the show, when I asked you how to introduce you, you used the word “academic.”  You said, “I'm an academic,” and I was like, “Oh, crap! He is one of them.” Because, I confess, it sounds like you are declaring that you are with the program.

So, you were an academic, you were a professor, you passed through that same system that I was put through too that was meant to turn you into a sleepwalker,

Emanuel Pastreich 

True.

Andrew Libson 

In that case, what was it in your own past, or in your upbringing, that kept you from becoming a sleepwalker, from becoming what your colleagues became?  

Emanuel Pastreich

First, I must confess that I was very much an establishment creature. I went to Yale and Harvard. My father went to Yale. My family was not rich, but were upper middle class, so we were never inconvenienced.

First, I had brain surgery in 1999, and although the result turned out reasonably well, there was a period of time which I wasn't sure what would happen, and I thought I might end up crippled or dead.

That experience forced me to think more deeply about what I was doing. And what the real purpose of all that education I received might be.

Then, one day I started a conversation with a woman who was working part-time at cafe in Tokyo while I was visiting briefly in August, 1999. She was living on the minimal pay she got working part time. I asked her what she did during her free time. She told me that she spent the rest of her time as volunteer helping homeless people.

I was a bit taken aback. I thought to myself, here am I, worried about whether I can get tenure or buy a big enough house for my family, and here was this young woman who can barely pay her bills and she's spending her free time as a volunteer helping others.

That was in 1999.  Then, in December of 2000, the Bush administration was installed, and then the regime seized control of the country in February, 2001—a story about which most people are not ready to talk yet.

As a result of my efforts to speak the truth at that fatal moment, I lost 85% of my associates. Some of them, to this day, will not talk to me. That was the first trial by fire.

The next trial was the COVID-19 regime starting in February, 2020, which is still going on. The two state crimes are structurally similar. The means were somewhat different, but players behind the screen are essentially the same.

And I lost a pile of friends and family again, I lost even more with Covid than I lost with 9/11.  

Part of the reason may lie in the historical process. Like Michael Hopf wrote,

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

Too much of the good life the last fifty years ruined the intellectuals who should have formed a brave vanguard.

Also, the experience of brain surgery made me face the possibility of death or debilitation. That gave me strength. As the Samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo wrote, if you enter a conflict of life and death, first imagine that you are already dead. Once you think you are already dead, you will find tremendous freedom and bravery comes from that liberation from attachments.

I'm going to be 60. On rare occasions I talk with professors whom I knew from the old days. They talk with each other about their retirement funds, their recent trip to Italy, their children's educations, their grandchildren, or the fabulous Italian food they ate last week. All their discussions are trivial and narcissistic. There's literally no discussion about what is happening to our society, or how we're going to create a better society.

Not everyone in society can be an intellectual, can get the specialized training necessary to understand how the world works. Therefore, that knowledge of the intellectual is not his or her personal property, but demands a commitment to society. Often that learning was paid for with the tax dollars of working people.

We need cooperation between intellectuals and workers—this is central to our project. It is important that the intellectual to be engaged with ordinary citizens and use his or her specialized knowledge not as a means of advancing personal benefits, or social status, but rather so as to serve society.

We witnessed the tremendous betrayal, the horrid treason, of the intellectuals during 9/11 and Covid. All of those intellectuals, those professors, lawyers, doctors, engineers, mid-level management people, etc. they all sided with the billionaires against the workers, and not with the workers against the billionaires. And that was a very tragic decision. What they did not know is that from the billionaire’s perspective, the difference between a CEO or a lawyer and a homeless person is the difference between an ant and a cockroach. They did not know they were signing their own death warrants.

Gema Sotomayor 

People are so immersed in their own little world that they're not seeing what's happening around them and they don't realize how horrible it is for others.  

For me at least, it was also an external thing that impacted me, that made me kind of be more aware.

Emanuel Pastreich

Your personal experience of living in Nicaragua made you so much wiser. You are wealthy, are rich beyond imagination, because you actually know what human nature is and how authoritarian government actually functions. Americans are so impoverished intellectually that they cannot see the truth unfolding before their eyes.

We're totally unprepared for what will come after this election on November 5^th. The election is significant because is the inflection point where we go from a sustainable fraud to an unsustainable fraud, where we have different factions, the factions of billionaires, killing and murdering each other, and everyone who gets in the way.

We need to be prepared for that. And being prepared for that future is not a matter of getting on the ballot.

We need to transform the idea of politics. Politics has become a dirty word. Politics means taking money for services, a form of prostitution. Please do not misunderstand me as I have deep respect for people who are forced into sex trade in order to support their families or to survive.

We are talking about a sale of one's soul, which is going on all around us. We have to say no to that show.

Andrew Libson

I think politics ultimately is not about selling your soul. Real politics is about finding your soul and finding a way of expressing it in words, but also through deeds and actions undertaken with others.

I hear people say, “I want to stay away from politics.” Well, first of all, you can't.

In order to change society, we have to embrace a politics that extends to every human and to figure out a way of turning society into something that's human versus the “unsustainable fraud” as you stated. The current

fraud is not sustainable, and it's been unsustainable for a long time. Now it is more obviously unsustainable. Unfortunately, that current situation is causing people to put their heads even deeper in the sand.   

Emanuel Pastreich

Leon Trotsky said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” You may not care about the military industrial complex, but it's very interested in you. It wants your assets and your soul. It wants control over you. You cannot divorce yourself from this larger structure.