New Year's Greeting for 2024

Words from Presidential Candidate Emanuel Pastreich

New Year's Greeting for 2024

January 1, 2024

On this New Year’s Day, I wish the very best to all Americans. We face together similar challenges at the political, the economic, the cultural, and the spiritual levels. The pressures and the threats seem overwhelming at times because the traditions in America we thought were made of solid marble have grown soft and mushy beneath our feet in a culture of indulgence and greed. But for all the hypocrisy and selfishness that sadly blinds our neighbors, our friends, and even our families, we can sense that truth and justice are leading us forward even as our foes seem so overwhelming.

The truth is, as I heard it said somewhere, that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you and it waits for you to unlock it and thereby to transform our nation. What is required is the bravery to confront the truth, the compassion to find commonalities with our neighbors, the righteousness to stand up for what is decent even when the corrupt and sick is promoted everywhere, the tenacity to carry on the battle for months, years, and decades until those who were blind start to see what we stand for, and the decisiveness to realize today what others thought will take centuries.

We Americans will not let this nation be reduced to a moral wasteland. 

We will not allow a handful of the rich to employ banks of supercomputers, running sophisticated algorithms, to manipulate and to dumb down our people, to use hidden persuaders in movies and dramas that induce narcissism and self-centeredness in our children, to run mass media campaigns to distract us from the current crisis by obsessing over the insignificant, to fabricate financial crises that destroy our lives, nor will we allow them to launch false-flag operations that will herd us into a Gaza of the soul.

We will not permit them to wall us in on all sides with economic bankruptcy, institutional collapse, cultural banality, spiritual depravity, intellectual barbarism, or physical slavery.

We will not follow the cardboard messiahs that they have prepared carefully for us backstage, nor will we use the flawed logic they feed to us through their public intellectuals and talk shows so to confuse us, nor will we fall for the cultural, racial, or identity conflicts that they have stirred up in order to divide us against each other.

Nothing will stop us from coming together “e pluribus unum” coming together to build a new nation, one that is built up from the basement of solid moral fiber, that follows exactly the plans that we have all agreed on; a mansion for the people that is built, not out of money and debt, not out of pornography, social media, and games, not out of weapons systems and surveillance technology, not out of offshore trusts and billionaire funds, but built out of the stuff of the human soul, and build by our people, each and every one of us, gathering together to write a new contract which binds us together as equal partners for the common good within a new nation state that follows the spirit and the word of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We will replace the private security and intelligence firms, IT, AI, and PR strategy teams, the investment banks and multinational corporations that now pose as a government with an honest government, a real government, a government for the people, of the people and by the people.